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Microsoft Announces It's Ready to Contribute to OpenJDK (jaxenter.com) 62

Posted by EditorDavid from the jumping-into-Java-development-kits dept.
"In a message to the OpenJDK community, Bruno Borges announced that Microsoft has now formally signed the Oracle Contributor Agreement and has been welcomed to the Java community," reports JAXenter: He went on to reaffirm Microsoft's commitment to Java and that the team is looking forward to giving something back to the Java community. However, the team will not just barge in with a heavy hand, but will start with smaller bug fixes and the like so they can learn how to be "good citizens within OpenJDK."

Borges, himself a former Oracle developer, is Principal Product Manager for Java at Microsoft. He presents Martijn Verburg as the Java engineering team lead who will be working together along with other partners in the Java ecosystem. Verburg is also CEO of jClarity, a leading AdoptOpenJDK contributor acquired by Microsoft in August this year, so presumably he will stay true to form and continue to contribute to the Java world, only now with Microsoft at his back...

Microsoft's acquisition of jClarity was just the latest in their efforts to gain a foothold in the Java community. There are many Java developers and Java champions who now practice their trade under Microsoft's banner... At JAX London a few weeks ago, Program Chair Sebastian Meyen opened the conference by giving a speech in which he said "Microsoft is now a Java shop". He sees this as a great development, as "it's always good when industry giants stand behind Java."
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Microsoft Announces It's Ready to Contribute to OpenJDK More

Microsoft Announces It's Ready to Contribute to OpenJDK

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  • Flashbacks to Visual J++ (Score:3)

    by ron_ivi ( 607351 ) <sdotno.cheapcomplexdevices@com> on Saturday November 02, 2019 @03:49PM (#59373250)
    Microsoft tried this before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] I guess the only reason it's more hopeful this time is that Oracle is even worse than Microsoft.

    • Re:Flashbacks to Visual J++ (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Saturday November 02, 2019 @04:13PM (#59373296)
      The funny thing about Visual J++ was despite it being a proprietary land grab, it was still a better implementation of Java than Sun's at the time.

      I doubt Microsoft have that intention this time. They're more interested in making Azure work well in Java without rocking the boat.

      • Better, in what sense?
        For that matter define better.

        • It was faster and it was easier to integrate with native code.
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • fortunately, Sun's java implementation running on Windows was not able to integrate with native Windows code properly, even their own, making it completely useless, and therefore the best of all possible java implementations.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by _merlin ( 160982 )

              No, it was easier to integrate with native code full stop. The p/invoke mechanism in C# is a port of the native code integration feature from J++. Sun's Java didn't have an equivalent feature at the time, and their answer was JNI. While more conceptually pure, JNI is far more of a pain to actually use. There's nothing that ties p/invoke to Windows - you could implement the same thing on another platform.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by DrXym ( 126579 )
                I can understand why Java never made it easy to integrate calling native code since it compelled coder to write portable code or at least isolate the platform dependencies in one place behind an interface. I've seen relatively trivial C# applications which were tainted with Win32 calls because devs were too fucking lazy to write something in a portable fashion.

                That said, it is sometimes necessary to make native calls and JNI is/was a pain in the ass since you had to define the interface in Java, generate

              • There's nothing that ties p/invoke to Windows - you could implement the same thing on another platform.

                Not just "could" - it's actually implemented on all platforms that Mono and .NET Core support. It's kinda hard to implement the .NET standard library without the ability to call native code somehow...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )
          It ran faster, it was easier to develop and debug and UI apps didn't look like shit. Microsoft were doing their usual embrace, extend and extinguish of course but the product was very slick, far slicker than Java 1.02 as it was at the time. UI development in Java has always been a sticking point but it was dire back when AWT was the only option.
    • Nice 20+ year old reference there. Visual J++ was never a serious platform nor much of a focus for Microsoft. Any other complaints from the Microsoft BOB era? MS tried being anti-competitive and watched their marketshare erode. Nadella was smart enough to realize that it is more profitable to take people's money and let them do whatever they want than try to lock them into your products. It's better to be loved, advocated for, and relied upon than to be coerced into paying. The old Microsoft is dead.

      • > Visual J++ was never a serious platform nor much of a focus for Microsoft

        Nonsense, Microsoft intended Java to be the language to replace Basic as the main application development language for windows.

  • Money says they try to DotNET it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday November 02, 2019 @04:08PM (#59373284)

    Unless you've been sleeping under a rock, you know MS loves to add proprietary extensions on stuff. I fully expect they are going to start off by adding some DotNET bridging crap for the part that is open source ("it's cross-platform, see!"). Then they'll offer the full extension to the rest of the DotNET facilities which of course will only work on Windows.

    This is classic Microsoft behavior.

    • Very dated reference - MS is focused on Azure now (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Saturday November 02, 2019 @04:34PM (#59373354)
      Everything you're talking about made sense under Ballmer and Gates, but Nadella seems much more interested in your cloud dollars than your software license dollars. I see Microsoft put a lot more effort into Azure than Windows, Office/Exchange/.NET/etc these days. Nadella doesn't really seem interested in controlling your platform or your behavior...just earning money and I appreciate that. I welcome them into the Java community. Microsoft today is not what they used to be 10 years ago and everything seems for the better from what I've seen so far.

      • All of the cloud providers want you to redesign your moneymaker software around their cloud services so you can't afford to move to a different provider.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          All of the cloud providers want you to redesign your moneymaker software around their cloud services so you can't afford to move to a different provider.

          Unless you're trying to get a lot of people to migrate to your platform, then you'll make tools and APIs to make it easy. If it's in Microsoft's favor to make Azure more compatible with AWS they'll work on it, if it's in Amazon's favor to make AWS more compatible with Azure they'll work on it. I don't really expect any company to make it easier to migrate to the competition, unless it's some kind of standard they have to follow or lose more than they gain.

          • Absolutely. That's why, for example, every cloud provider makes sure that the likes of PostgreSQL and ActiveMQ work nicely with their service, but none of them support the same graph database system natively. Part of the cloud business model is "standards where existing code already depends on them, lock-in where it doesn't".

      • If I had the points, I'd mod you up. Freetards are still stuck in the past.

        Microsoft is chasing the cloud dollars now, not the lock-in dollars. What's the best cloud to use? The one that works with everything - Microsoft knows this and has adapted.

      • One stat in particular that people should be more aware of: the majority of Azure deployments run Linux. This has actually been true for a year now.

        And Azure is the fastest growing revenue stream for Microsoft. So not adequately supporting Linux directly hurts the company bottom line. Which is why you see so much MS software being ported to Linux these days. It's even veering into office software at this point, with the recently announced Linux client for MS Teams.

    • Except in this case it'll be an Oracle-Microsoft duopoly, at least until Microsoft decides to “dissolve” the partnership:

      Sep 1995 [edge-op.org]: “One strategy is to jump on the Java bandwagon and try and take control of the class libraries and runtime. This may be the best alternative but this decision impacts across the company. .. We should consider support for Java as a platform. As a company we have to options for embracing and extending Java: (1) we tale control of it and add Windows specific cl
  • Microsoft has worked out how they can fuck with it for their own purposes. Corrupting and polluting it beyond all recognition... Till no one wants to use it anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swilver ( 617741 )

      Good luck getting it past the other members that have a vested interest in keeping Java dominant. This shit might have worked in 2000, and they tried, and failed. No way this will work now that is entrenched in every business globally for over 20 years.

  • “you hereby grant to us a perpetual [oracle.com], irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, no-charge, royalty-free, unrestricted license to exercise all rights under those copyrights. This includes, at our option, the right to sublicense these same rights to third parties through multiple levels of sublicensees or other licensing arrangements”

    Can the sublicensees further sublicense the product without any legal linkage to either Microsoft or Oracle? As compared to the GPL “You must license the entire

    • > Can the sublicensees further sublicense the product without any legal linkage to either Microsoft or Oracle?

      The text you quoted says "multiple levels of sublicensees". Which means Oracle can grant other the right to further sublicense, under whatever terms they choose.

      One set of terms they are currently offering is GPLv2+CE. Oracle OpenJDK and other distributions of OpenJDK are GPLv2+CE. Oracle has another JDK which is not open source. There is a lot of the same code in both - the same code available

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swilver ( 617741 )

      Can the sublicensees further sublicense the product without any legal linkage to either Microsoft or Oracle?

      That depends on the license Oracle gives you, and as far as I'm aware, they currently donot have a license that grants the same unlimited rights to a sublicensee.

  • Do any of you haters realize just much Java code Microsoft owns? Think of all of the acquisitions over the past 20 years and what technology stacks it may have been written in. Ya think they immediately rewrote it all? Maybe, just maybe, MSFT has an honest, legitimate business purpose for doing this. And, if you must dwell on the past, remember that IE is still free and Java isn't anymore :P

    • ...remember that IE is still free and Java isn't anymore

      Nonsense. IE is still the same closed, proprietary mess it always was, and Java is still licensed under the GPL. Oracle no longer provides pre-compiled binaries for the newer versions, but 3rd parties now do that (and most Linux distributions continue providing it as if nothing has changed).

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ... MS is also ready to contribute to this newfangled steam engine technology invented by a guy called James Watt. They will also invest in the edison startup to help develop their lightbulb technology.

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