Sun announces to Open Source Java (again/finally?)

[OneSeventeen]

It seems like this is an ongoing topic, but it might be that sun is actually going to open up their JRE finally!

InfoWorld Article (http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/27/79685_HNsunopensourcejava_1.html)

Could we expect this in Dapper at some point if this opens up soon, or will we have to wait for Edgy?

Looks kind of interesting though... it might make a lot of Java apps run much smoother!

[bruce89]

What licence will it be under is what I want to know.

[DR_K13]

i read about this in eweek quite a while ago... they are dragging ***. I dont think it will be GNU

[bruce89]

I don't understand the bit where it says
"Many observers say Sun's moves are late, as Microsoft Corp. has gained ground with its own .NET and C# programming languages."
Windows is the only platform which MS supports, it's not the same as Java.

[curuxz]

I don't understand the bit where it says
"Many observers say Sun's moves are late, as Microsoft Corp. has gained ground with its own .NET and C# programming languages."
Windows is the only platform which MS supports, it's not the same as Java.

Yeah even mono is a joke, windows .net is a pile of crap and I hope it dies like many believe it will. Personaly I think mono should be disbanded as it only supports a format lockin attempt by MS.

Java is coooool I wana see it made faster and hopefully opensource so that it would be allowed on Ubuntu's disks not just in the main repo's

[bruce89]

Yeah even mono is a joke, windows .net is a pile of crap and I hope it dies like many believe it will. Personaly I think mono should be disbanded as it only supports a format lockin attempt by MS.

Java is coooool I wana see it made faster and hopefully opensource so that it would be allowed on Ubuntu's disks not just in the main repo's
I don't think it will ever be free enough. It'll no doubt be licenced under something weird. Mind you, mono is commercially dual-licenced as well - http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing#Licensing.

[ComplexNumber]

on the other hand.......


Sun: Open source is about self-interest

Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference, Sun Microsystems' chief open-source officer, Simon Phipps (http://news.com.com/Sun+sets+up+open-source+office/2100-7344_3-5838721.html?tag=nl), said that open source had been focused for too long on sharing code instead of what he called "the enrichment of the commons."
The open-source community needed to look to the lessons of capitalism and capitalists, Phipps said. Referring to the recent announcement that billionaire Warren Buffett was donating much of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (http://news.com.com/Buffett+donates+his+billions+to+Gates+foundation/2100-1022_3-6087682.html?tag=nl), Phipps pointed out that "Warren Buffett is driving gold--he is creating wealth."
Expanding on his message, Phipps said that the message of open source was that "creating and maintaining a completely independent code base was ultimately self-defeating."




.......................................



But while Phipps was happy to be outspoken in his presentation, he was moved to silence in at least one area. In introducing Phipps, the conference chairman and vice president of the ECM company Alfresco, Matt Asay, said that he hoped that he was "going to hear today that Sun has decided to open source Java (http://news.com.com/Sun+promises+to+open-source+Java/2100-7344_3-6072760.html?tag=nl)." Phipps remained silent on the subject. read the rest he (http://news.com.com/Sun+Open+source+is+about+self-interest/2100-7344_3-6088858.html?tag=nefd.top)re.

[G Morgan]

Mono isn't supporting a proprietry lockin attempt it is an attempt to break the format lockin before it happens. We've been hit badly in the past by this sort of thing and 15 years ago people should have been looking at .doc format for Linux rather than playing late catch up, .Net will succeed and its better to have an implementation available so all those apps will be cross platform. Otherwise MS will just say, 40% of apps are .Net and that doesn't even work on Linux, buy Windows 2011 instead now with weekly MPA checks and £3000 price tag.

As for Java, the talk of forking is madness. Only implementations that match Suns specifications can use the name Java so a fork wouldn't be called Java anymore and nobody can confuse it as such. At the same time if somebody wants to have Java with pointers, operator overloading and memory management let them just don't allow them to call it Java.

Suns real worry is a lot of people would like an interpreted VM based language with those features and that Java might end up deprecated by them. Personally I find Java to be so inefficient to be tolerable anyway, with Az killing even powerful boxes you can see why a lot of people avoid Java.