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Java Programming

Sun opens up Java 2 platform source 55

Posted by Hemos from the stepin'-on-up dept.
Manuka writes "An Inforworld article tells us that Sun, in an effort to make Java more accessible, has made the Java 2 source available under a new license. " The new license makes it possible for "developers to use and modify the source code for commercial products free of charge; allows them to change the code without having to return their changes to Sun; and lets developers modify and share source code without involving Sun." A step in the right direction.
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Sun opens up Java 2 platform source More

Sun opens up Java 2 platform source

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  • Does this mean that the Blackdown developers can
    pre-release their almost working source? or
    the diffs to them?
  • Posted by DarkYoda:

    It better be alot faster
    or someone might get hurt!

    ~SbD~
  • Posted by Mr. Assembly:

    I got to be honest, who is gong to want to look at NT source 18 months from now. As corporations 'get it' there's not going to be a market for code
    that's going to need massive hours to debug. It will be easier to be a rat, leave the ship, and do a linux port.
  • Alright, one more time: Sun was not suing MS because they made changes, but because they made changes in such a way that the programmer could no longer identify the portable from the proprietary.

    According to the rules, every class that is part of the official portable cross-platform Java spec goes into the java.* heirarchy (java.lang, java.util, java.awt, etc...). Anything that is not portable goes outside the java.* heirarchy, for example, "mystuff.whatever.classA", or perhaps something like "win32.some.proprietary.exra".

    The idea is that then, unlike in most other languages, the programmer doesn't need to rely on some big manual to figure out what is and isn't portable - the programmer just knows from the name of the class in the hierarchy if it is proprietary or not.

    That's what MS ruined, by adding Win32-specific extras to the java.* hierarchy instead of as separate classes. And that's what Sun's complaint is about.

    Under the new license, people could grab sun's source and make their own versions of the classes, but they'd better not install them into java.* like MS tried to do - put them somewhere else.

  • This makes the, unfounded, assumption that there is only a single pool of developers and that all
    applications overlap...this is probably not true.

    The only way you will get a kernel hacker writing java is at gunpoint, it just has no relevance for
    what they want to do. One would imagine that this is the same in reverse for many groups.

    Of course there will be projects that don't get sufficient interest to build a development team.
    That is expected, evolution in action. It also means that there is an opening for a commercial
    product here.

    I guess any evolutionary system requires some products to fail the fitness test, but given the
    permanence of computer storage they live on as open source fossils (which can be revived should
    it be neccessary).
  • is the One True Way. Client side java is bullshit.

  • That's a good question, and my response is that ports to linux & freebsd could be made to pass the compliance tests much sooner if we could debug in parallel, which means letting people like you and me find bugs in the betas. Make sense?
  • ...but I think it's actually worse than the previous license, in terms of getting a functioning jdk for linux. Read this page [blackdown.org] for an idea of what needs to be done.

    And don't forget to check out the classpath project [classpath.org], which stands a better chance of getting Java2 features to linux in a reasonable timeframe.

  • You're right, I overstepped reality there with that one. Well, probably. It depends upon how long it takes the blackdown folk to shake-out every last arcane boundary-condition tested by the JCK. I bet the floating-point stuff will be fun.

    And, as someone else pointed out, one could always just run swing on 1.1.7.

  • I've read several people mention that one drawback of the new license is that it doesn't improve matters at all for the people doing the linux/jdk port at blackdown.org. Apparently, the new license scheme doesn't let them put their port up on an ftp server until it passes all of the compliance tests, meaning that we get none of the benefits of having a multitude of eyeballs to make the bugs shallow.

    So, while it may seem like open-source on the surface, it seems like they've managed to make an almost-open-source license that has all of the hype and none of the benefit, at least for the freenix community, anyway.

  • Damn, you GO Sun! :)
  • Hey, compliance testing may be a pain in the ass, but I for one wouldn't mind knowing that what I write will work flawlessly elsewhere because of it. That is, if I even used Java... ;>

  • LOL (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    Amen brother.
  • Great idea! Why rely on Microsoft to open gaping security holes in your system when we can do it in our vastly-superior Free Software way!

    Not only is Perl code difficult to maintain, making it lousy for enterprise applications, but it has no security model! What could be a better for an applet language except, possibly scheme?

  • Neither were really intended for doing graphical/windowed stuff. Tcl, on the other hand, has a mature, fast, cross-platform windowing toolkit. And there happen to already be Tcl/Tk plugins available for both Netscape and IE.

    Personally I like Java quite a lot. But once in a while I get the feeling that Tcl is still a better-developed system for writing secure, windowed, cross-platform code. And I sure wish I knew why people were so scathing of it.

  • and RMS himself has commented on how this license is just a sham to try to get free work out of developers.
    The point of Free Software is to get free work out of developers. In what way is that a sham?
  • You might be shocked to hear this but there are a lot of people that get paid to develop "free" software.
    Why should I be shocked? I've been there. But the rest of the people that use the resulting software get it for free, so they've gotten "free work out of the developers". My point is that I don't see how trying "to get free work out of the developers" is a sham. Aren't the people who are perpetually asking for new features in Linux, EMACS, the GIMP, etc., trying to do exactly that? Are those people guilty of a sham?
  • I would really like it if things were this way for more open source projects- you put them under GPL, but also allow licensing of the product in a non-GPL product.
    In other words, you are asking for exactly how the GPL already works.

    There is absolutely NOTHING in the GPL that precludes the software from being provided by its owner under a different license. Many people have already done this. Examples include Ghostscript and Kaffe. In fact, paragraph 12 of the GPL actually explicitly states this. Of course, the owner is not required to do so.

    What the GPL prohibits is someone other than the owner from taking the GPL'd code and releasing it under a different license.

    Presumably, as the author of code that you want to offer under multiple licenses, you must surely want this protection?

  • TRUE ! (Score:1)

    by SimonK ( 7722 )
    Richness my ****. They added methods to the java.* classes. I have Visual J++ on my machine here in front of me and I am looking at it right now ... There are extra methods in the java.* hierarchy. Thats the problem, and it is *one* of the breaches of their license agreement with Sun (the others being not implementing the entire platform spec and modifying the core language).
  • Yeah, Mozilla could stand be another 5 or 10 megabytes bigger...
  • Yes, of course, compliance is good for Java. The problem is that the people working at Blackdawn (is that it?) can't release their source until it's finished. This is a problem, as open source things tend to get finished much quicker when they're actually open.
  • Steps like this make me think that the flood-gates are going to open over the next 18 months. The source to NT will probably be open by then. However there are only so many cumulative OSS geek hours in a day. What then? As much of this newly liberated code languors on the net unimproved will the mystique of OSS crumble?
  • Nope. They took MS to court for messing with the definition of Java. This new licensing affects the implementation of Java, which is a rather different thing.
    --

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