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Thursday April 19, 2007

Build on the Java Stack

Today I'm wearing my Ubuntu shirt because today is the day Feisty Fawn (7.04) has been released and it includes Sun's complete Java stack.

For over a year we have been working aggressively to make our software available on Free Software distributions. It is easy to underestimate the complexity of the challenges involved. Last year when we worked in the DLJ license the Sun business, legal, and engineering teams learned a great deal about rights for distro redistribution and integration.

Since that time we have been busily working on open sourcing the six million lines of code which comprise Sun's implementation of the Java SE Platform as part of the OpenJDK project. The interconnected constraints of software licensing, transitioning our business models, and expanding OpenJDK community are labyrinthine.

Stepping back for just a moment one can understand the significance of Sun following a trajectory towards Free Software. We believe Free Software is an extraordinarily important force in technology innovation and that participating in -- indeed making significant contributions to -- this movement are essential for Sun's business going forward. Our recent visit to Brazil has demonstrated how one country views open source as strategic to government (as well as industry and academia). We are proud to have a Free Software stack that runs on an eco-friendly hardware stack (including the GPL'd UltraSPARC T1). Today's announcement is another point in the arc of making money (and doing good) with Free.

This is an exciting day for me because I'm a big fan of Free Software and impatient to unlock the power of cool projects that can reach new audiences. I couldn't have helped move this project forward if it wasn't for the advice of my friends at Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, Gentoo, OpenSUSE and, of course, Ubuntu. I especially want to thank the director of NetBeans, Jan Chalupa, for embracing this project and driving the repackaging of NetBeans 5.5 and making distro packaging an essential goal for NetBeans 6.0. Today we are talking about our stack in multiverse, but it's important to see that this work is getting us closer to main and thus helps all Free Software distros.

Working together as a Java community we can continue our discussions on modularizing and harmonizing the distribution of runtimes, libraries and applications so that we can package and distribute the enormous wealth of existing Java applications.

Windows platforms have classically had point-and-click software installers. Solaris has had the Java Enterprise System installer. But now we see that Linux software management has caught up (a possibly exceeded?) the other platforms. Ultimately that makes the argument for building applications on top of the Java stack even stronger: they will be easily installable and "just work" everywhere.

People have asked me if this new excitement might lead to adding Java to the "Linux tool chain", or renewed bindings for Java in Gnome or KDE. Each of these ideas is worth exploring in further detail. But what makes me really thrilled is to think that this may be the year that the Linux desktop finally gains traction against Windows. The Linux desktop is fully featured now: I've been running Ubuntu Feisty since January (while under development) and I've found it to be very stable and quite friendly. I especially appreciate the ability to do simple things like suspend my laptop and use WiFi radar while traveling.

Tom meets the Ubuntu Brazil team at FISL (photo courtesy of Tim Boudreau)