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Wednesday May 03, 2006
Open Source Java The open source Java topic seems to come in waves. With this wave the speculation is that Jonathan's Open Source, sharing, and transparent ways will enter the world of Java. To get this out in front, I have no idea if Java will be open sourced. Even though you haven't asked, I'll give you my thoughts :)
I have one primary concern about Open Source Java. That the platform will be diluted, and not necessarily for nefarious reasons. For example, this comment about removing Swing from a server build of Java comment enough seems innocent enough, but would it be the start of a trend? Would we end up seeing specific builds of Java for specific problem sets? Would it stay together as a full Write Once Run Anywhere platform (WORA)? I supposed this could be addressed under a license.
The fact that there is so much discussion going on is of interest. The discussion is all over the map. Some like the idea of Open Source Java. Some think that will negatively affect WORA. There doesn't seem to be any general consensus building. Perhaps that means there is a tremendous amount of pent-up innovation. What do you think?
(2006-05-03 07:39:25.0) Permalink Comments [12]Comments are closed for this entry.
Posted by Mikael Gueck on May 03, 2006 at 08:00 AM PDT #
Posted by Wes Felter (IBM Research) on May 03, 2006 at 12:02 PM PDT #
Posted by Romain Guy on May 03, 2006 at 04:57 PM PDT #
Mikael, thanks for the comment. A similar thread was covered in a previous entry.
Wes, what is the market penetration of those non-certified implementations? I think most developers want compatibility and will use Java. If it is not certified, it is not Java. In some ways, a non-certified implementation is an oxymoron, but I grok what you mean :) What would a "Core Edition" contain? Would that satisfy enough of the developers or would they want to create their own distributions including, lets say, log4j instead of JDK logging? It comes down to how developers see Java, as a language with a vm and libraries, or as a platform.
Romain, well said.
Posted by John Clingan on May 03, 2006 at 06:23 PM PDT #
Posted by Wes Felter (IBM Research) on May 03, 2006 at 06:32 PM PDT #
Posted by Xavier Cho on May 03, 2006 at 07:55 PM PDT #
Posted by Mikael Gueck on May 04, 2006 at 08:06 AM PDT #
I am very sceptical about open-sourcing Java because I think that Sun did a fairly good job so far to keep Java on track. There will always be people thinking that they can do a better job but it is not about one person's input but rather the complete output of a team. Looking back to the evolution of Java it could have been gone easier worse than better and the vibrant open-source community around Java speaks volumes. I do not agree with all the decisions that Sun made along the way but I am still a full-time Java developer with no aspirations to change in the near future.
The other point is a general problem with who is controlling an open-source project. Sun could easily open-source Java and still maintain control over the check-ins and the use of 'Java' as trademark and we would be as far as we are now. Sun started a few months ago to allow outsiders like me to contribute code to Java and actually a bug fix from me made it into Mustang. Again if Sun is controlling who can contribute and decide what makes it in or not then we have already accomplish that. As I learned the hard way when I was kicked out of the JBoss project the important question in an open-source project is who is controlling the project. If like in JBoss a single person (the creator of the SF project) is in charge he has the final say or in case of an Apache project where nobody controls a project the creator can easily loose his/her influence when the other team members stab him in the back. So the creator has to choose carefully which path to go and the contributors have to be aware of who is controlling an open-source project.
Posted by Andreas Schaefer on May 04, 2006 at 02:04 PM PDT #
As an offical rep of Sun could you try proposing a stripped down, open JVM that could be embedded and redistributed in Mozilla? A lot of work has gone into Javascript Spidermonkey (C version), but they also have Rhino (JVM version). Mozilla is extremely sensitive to download sizes so this has to be the minimal possible package. You would just be proposing this without committing to it to see what kind of response you get.
Getting the JVM in Mozilla would obviously get it installed onto millions of desktops. The JVM would instantly become the standard VM on Linux. You would want this coordinated with standard edition Java so that two JVMs don't get installed. I'll never understand why Sun didn't embedded in Mozilla five years ago.
It is unclear to me if Mozilla would accept your offer. Not having a redistributable Java for so long has caused all of the projects to make other choices. Things may have gone too far with gjc and mono for Sun to recover.
Post it to this list:
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-general
Posted by Jon Smirl on May 04, 2006 at 07:28 PM PDT #
Posted by Dalibor Topic on May 05, 2006 at 09:33 AM PDT #
One giant thing that gets dragged around in Java is megabytes of character translation tables. Mozilla already has those and you don't want two copies.
The whole WORA concept is flawed. If I want to use java byte code to replace Javascript in Mozilla, I don't care if it runs anywhere - I only want it to run in Mozilla. WORA is just one class of app, by sticking to the WORA mantra all the other application classes are shut out. Obviously Sun understands this since they made the micro editions for their own purposes, they just don't allow anyone else to make a micro version.
Posted by Jon Smirl on May 05, 2006 at 11:02 AM PDT #
Thought I would include a forward reference.
Posted by John Clingan on May 08, 2006 at 01:31 PM PDT #