Sun to open source Java

[W1nTry]

Article:

Sun will open source Java "in months"

Still working out how


By Nick Farrell: Wednesday 28 June 2006, 07:39

SUN HAS indicated that it is only a few months from releasing Java under an open source licence.
Simon Phipps, chief open-source officer for Sun, said that the company was trying to work out how to keep Java compatible as it did not want to threaten Java's "write once, run anywhere" concept.

The move to Open Sauce followed the replacement of Scott McNealy as Sun CEO by Jonathan Schwartz. Schwartz is keen on open sourcing Java while McNealy always blocked it.

However, according to Infoworld, there is a hard core of Sun middle managers who are opposed to the Open Sourcing of Java and are likely to present obstacles for its release under a new licence.

[disciple]

hmm... well, there has been talk of this for quite some time, with sun supposedly considering it for about a year or so..


i doh see what advantages open sourcing brings, but hey.. thas just me

[TinyGrasshopper]

I'm doubtful since yes, it's been promised for awhile but I suspect this one's for real. Advantages would be that other major players, like IBM, and Novell could have a say in its development. It could FINALLY be shipped out of the box on GNU/Linux distros, as well as ported to niche platforms and it would increase development on it which is good since Ruby is gnawing at it. Now if only I could say the same for Flash (well there's Gnash)

[disciple]

true, with the niche platforms that sun doh take on.. i didn't think of /forgot about that

but the inability to ship with the distros, thas cuz of an incompatibility with GPL, not so?
also, doesn't IBM already have somewhat of a say with it? wait.. no.. they just have their own JVM.. (which is not the same thing as one unified product)

with regards to increased development, i read recently that java overtook c++ as the most popular lang on sourceforge.. perhaps this may be the thing that sends it to critical mass

anyhow, i wonder how they gonna do it? prob a setup like mozilla foundation, or openoffice..  i doubt they go just release it into the wild just so

again,  thas if they release it at all

[TinyGrasshopper]

Yeah, but C# taking over Java these days especially since it's a published ECMA standard. Even linux developers like the GNOME guys are thinking about writing more and more things in C# with Mono.

I think part of the reason it didn't ship with distros was the licensing agreement that had to be clicked through. They changed that licencing scheme but most popular desktop distros insist that userspace apps be open-source to ship with it.

They'll probably do it like with openoffice, continuing to host everything themselves. I think they should spin off openoffice and java out into foundations.

[disciple]

i thought openoffice was already spun out as a foundation?
http://council.openoffice.org/

 sun still contributes heavily, seein that they use the source in their own Star Office, but i believe that openoffice for the most part is autonomous

doesnt netscape have a similar arrangement with the mozilla foundation? ( with firefox being the basis of navigator ) ..   


the other major open source contributors IBM and Novell are already hawking their own office wares, Lotus Suite and GroupWise, respectively, so i guess they would prob thinkin that it would be a conflict of interest to be involved in a large way 

[TinyGrasshopper]

I don't think so. It's still Sun's baby. Fedora has a board and they're still essentially Red Hat's. We need some proper clarification

[disciple]

Sun continues its efforts to open source Java          
      
   Sun Microsystems Inc. is planning to make more of its Java platform available as open source, but Canadian experts say the move could have more to do with marketing than software development.    
   9/12/2006 2:00:00 PM    
   by Neil Sutton    
Sun has made efforts in the last year or two to open source more of its products. In June 2005, Sun launched its Glassfish project, providing access to portions of Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9 code under the Java Research Licence. In June of this year the company committed more Java to open source and confirmed recently that Java Standard Edition and Java Micro Edition (its mobile platform) will receive the open source treatment.

“It's a natural thing to keep moving through the various editions of the Java platform, releasing them in open source form,” said Jean Elliott, director of developer marketing for Sun.

The development community has been asking for the move away from proprietary code, and to a large degree it will be up to the community to help regulate the company's open source products, she said.

There have been concerns in the past that the development platform could “fork,” or split into incompatible versions, if it's open-sourced. But developers place a premium on compatibility, which should help to keep the language in line, she said. “Sometimes we have to let the market decide,” she said. “That's a very important consideration for us . . . we've heard loud and clear that developers want to write applications that will run in as many as places as possible. They care that there's a compatible platform for them to run those applications on.

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