Message 03622 [Homepage] [Navigation]
Thread: oxenT03622 Message: 1/1 L0 [In index]
[First in Thread] [Last in Thread] [Date Next] [Date Prev]
[Next in Thread] [Prev in Thread] [Next Thread] [Prev Thread]

[ox-en] Sun Pours Out Java Cup



Sun Pours Out Java Cup
By Chris Preimesberger
November 13, 2006 	
<http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2055770,00.asp>

To those long-suffering open-source developers who have been waiting for
years to venture unencumbered into Java code and tweak it to their
heart's content, Sun Microsystems has three things to say: G, P and L.

Sun on Nov. 13 released at www.sun.com/java all versions of
Java—Standard, Enterprise and Micro Edition—under GNU GPL (General
Public License) Version 2.0. Sun will maintain its commercial license
and its CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) in a
multiple-license menu for certain customers that have already built
systems based on previous contracts.

"This undoubtedly is the largest single open-source contribution in the
history of IT," Rich Green, executive vice president of software for
Sun, said in an interview here. "It's the mental final step for Sun and
Java."

For many of the 11 years the Java programming language has been in
production use, software developers have been griping privately and
publicly that the Santa Clara, Calif., company should release it to the
open-source community. Java would be more valuable and allow for more
innovation if it was freed from corporate ownership and allowed to
thrive in the open market, they say.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz promised May 16 at the company's JavaOne
Conference that this would be done as soon as possible.

"It's a real tribute to our software, business and legal, marketing, and
NetBeans teams that they were able to pull this thing off in just six
months," Green said.

The transition was tedious and legalistic, said Sun General Counsel Mike
Dillon. "Java Standard Edition contains about 6 million lines of code,"
Dillon said. "Our legal team [of 190 lawyers] had to go over it, line by
line, and look for all copyright marks and third-party involvements.
Where Sun didn't have the correct licenses, we had to contact the
owners, one by one, and determine the rights." In some cases, Sun had to
settle with copyright owners.

Dillon said the company considered some of the 200-plus open-source
licenses but settled on the GPL because "it has the largest development
community at this time driving innovation, and that is what Sun is
striving for."

Green said Sun expects a new community called "Open JDK" to develop
around Java SE. The mobile and embedded version, Java ME, already has a
community, as does the Java Enterprise Edition open-source project
GlassFish, which began in 2005 and has already created an open-source
application server. Green said he does not anticipate any friction
between the JCP (Java Community Process), which currently governs Java
development and has strong ties to Sun itself, and the open-source
community.

"JCP concerns itself mainly with what's inside Java," Green said. "The
open-source community will mainly be building on top of Java the
applications they need to build. All development will follow a natural
order, we believe."

The ubiquitous nature of the JVM (Java virtual machine) and
often--tangled proprietary development ties to the parent company had
been the key factors holding up the transition. Sun had responded by
releasing bits and pieces of its prize IP to the community during the
last few months.

Early reaction from analysts, developers and Sun commercial customers
has been positive. The main redemption for the commercial licensing,
which often runs into seven figures, is indemnification, Green said.
"Plus the full support of the branded products by the company.
Open-source software does not provide for protection from litigation;
that's the nature of open source," he said.

eWEEK.com Special Report: Sun's Identity Crisis

James Gosling, on medical leave from his research position at Sun and
generally considered the "father" of Java, has long supported keeping
Java on a leash. But Gosling said in a blog recently that he was "really
happy we're finally getting it done. The only thing I'm unhappy about is
how many complexities there are to take care of."

Green, who returned to Sun in May after two years at virtualization
provider Cassatt, said that one of the main reasons he came back to the
company was the opportunity to help bring Java to the open-source
community. Prior to his time at Cassatt, Green had worked for Sun for 14
years.

Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with RedMonk, in Denver, said he wasn't
surprised that Sun was finally opening up Java. Choosing the GPL made
sense, given its popularity in a number of open-source communities.

eWEEK.com Special Report: Java Futures

"It will definitely help within the development community," O'Grady
said. "From an enterprise customer perspective, [there's] probably very
little [change]. There are some businesses that have run into bugs with
Java that an open-source version could address, but, overall,
enterprises aren't likely to be terribly excited by the news."

"This is a great move for the Internet ecosystem, adding open-source
Java to the mix," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux
distribution, which is based in Douglas on the United Kingdom's Isle of
Man. "Not having open Java is why the community had to devise things
like Ruby on Rails and PHP. Now the restrictions are gone, and a lot
more experimentation can begin."

Matt Jacobsen, a Java developer with New Atlanta Communications, in
Atlanta, said he didn't see Sun suddenly being considered the world's
foremost open-source software company because of the move. "I'm sure
they'll spin it that way, but I certainly won't see it as that,"
Jacobsen said. "This seems more like a reaction to years of pressure for
this at a time when Sun has little else going for them. I do think the
choice of GPL is probably a smart move on their part, now that Java has
permeated as much as it has."

Larry Rosen, a Stanford University Law School lecturer and former chief
counsel for the Open Source Initiative, said that "Sun is to be
congratulated, and they are doing a good deed. They are indeed an
open-source company, but not the only one. Maybe instead they can be
called a model to be emulated."

The move is important because it makes Java "available for incorporation
into other GPL-licensed software," said Rosen in Ukiah, Calif. "Because
the GPL covers so much software, that's a huge plus. But it won't help
organizations like [the Apache Software Foundation], whose use of Java
will still be difficult because the GPL is incompatible with the Apache
license. That license compatibility problem remains to be solved another
day, perhaps with a new version of the GPL."

Sun's move, while positive, will not erase all those years of
constricted licensing that drove away developers, said RedMonk's
O'Grady. "But it will undoubtedly be a relief for Sun to not have to
answer questions on open-sourcing Java any longer," he said.

Open-Sourcing at Sun

Sun's release of Java under the GNU GPL is the latest move by the
company to give its technology to the open-source community. Other
technologies open-sourced by Sun include:

2004 Looking Glass, a user interface technology

2005 Solaris operating system; GlassFish application server technology;
jMaki AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) tool

2006 UltraSPARC T1 multicore "Niagara" processor

Source: eWEEK reporting
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



Thread: oxenT03622 Message: 1/1 L0 [In index]
Message 03622 [Homepage] [Navigation]