Java and security bits

From No Charge To Free

I first became aware of Java in the fall of 1995 sometime after the Netscape announcement and long before I joined Sun. It was around the release of JDK 1.0 beta as I was working on a paper on Java security (published a year later). At the time I was amazed that Sun was making the technology available as a no-charge ($0) download. I could even get access to the complete source code for research purposes after just sending some signed legal agreement to Sun!

Things have sure changed since then. What was considered extremely open a decade ago seems like less than the bare minimum today. Developers have become used to getting software without charge, more often than not with the source code and the rights to change the code and redistribute those changes. In other words, open source. Java has also become more open, but has not fully followed the larger trend. Not any more!

As has been well covered absolutely everywhere, Sun's Java implementation is being released as free software under the Free Software Foundation's GPL open source license. That is the exactly the same license used by the GNU classpath project. For Java SE, the first two components are being released today with all of JDK 6 and JDK 7 following next year. For all the details and the code, please see the OpenJDK project and the FAQ.

This means all the JDK code that I am involved in will soon be open source. In particular, we plan to include all the security code in the full launch next year, even those parts that have been excluded from the current JRL source drops on java.net for legal reasons (JSSE and JCE). And since we are open sourcing the Sun JDK, that will also include JSR 268 Smart Card I/O API, even though it is not a part of the Java SE 6 platform specification. Just as importantly, because we are releasing the source code for the in-development JDK 7 release, you will get access to the implementations of JSR 277 modules and JSR 294 superpackages as soon as those pieces are integrated into the main source tree sometime next year. All that ready to use under the GPL license.

While not everybody will be happy with all the choices that have been made, a lot of people seem rather pleased. We have statements from many important players in the free software world, be it Tim O'Reilly, Red Hat, Trolltech, Intel, or Ubuntu. Having been able to line up all these people shows that Sun is really serious about open source Java. But if there is one quote that carries more weight than any other and is the least expected, it can only be that of Richard Stallman (video):

I think Sun has [well, with this contribution have] contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. It shows leadership. It’s an example I hope others will follow.

There is nothing I can add to that.

Posted at 12:34 Nov 13, 2006 by Andreas Sterbenz in Java  |