Submitted by Back in May 2006, Sun announced during the JavaOne conference it would release Java as open source, licensed as GPL software. While it was released as GPL, it still contained about 5 percent proprietary, non-free code – the Java trap, as the FSF calls it. The FSF called to dismantle this trap, and now the IcedTea project has reached an important milestone.The IcedTea project, launched by Red Hat, built on the foundations of the GNU Classpath project to replace the proprietary code in the OpenJDK.
The latest OpenJDK binary included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation – in keeping with the portability goal of the Java platform. As of writing, Fedora 9 is the only operating system to include a free and open Java SE 6 implementation that has passed the Java TCK. All of the code that makes this possible has been made available to the IcedTea project so everyone can benefit from the work.
The Java Test Compatibility Toolkit is quite the comprehensive test suite, consisting of over 1 million lines of source code, which tests if a Java implementation conforms to Java specifications. Passing the test ensures your implementation is proper Java.
This means Java is now 100% Free Software.
The Java trap wasn’t about the 5% of non-free code iirc; It was about the issue that one could write an opensource program in java but you would always need a non-free Runtime.
It is however true that with the final 5% of non-free code eliminated in the openjdk project the Java Trap as a whole is history.
…and for more pragmatic individuals, there never was a “Java Trap.” While the individuals involved are to be congratulated on technical achievement, I still feel that the whole “Java Trap” was more political than practical.
Yes, free software is good, but it isn’t always better.
If anyone deserves a large amount of credit here, it is Sun for listening to their developers and doing what they asked for.
Edited 2008-06-19 21:29 UTC
Hear Hear.
Also what a lot of people conviently tend to forget is the fact that the JDK source has always been available. Just not under a license as liberal as the GPL.
But the advantage for a developer being able to debug trough the whole stack of the JDK has always been available.
The GPL is not liberal , it’s Free Software.
The JDK source was not always available and developer wher enot always able to debug all the problems.
What you conveniently forget is that it means that JAVA from now on , will not be a plug-in or an extension from now on , but will be inlcuded natively.
That would explain why I got to view the source to Java 1.1 that I downloaded off Sun’s site sometime in ’97.
The Java source code was always available. It was a separate download, and you had to click through another set of agreements, but you were always able to download it. Granted, you were not able to distribute the changes you made to the JDK though you could send the patches upstream to Sun.
You surely had acess to 100% of it ( the answer to that is no ) … Java 1.1 is also the only JAVA that exist ( again the answer is also no … ) Java is also circa 1991 but released in 1995 …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)
“Sun distinguishes between its Software Development Kit (SDK) and Runtime Environment (JRE) that is a subset of the SDK, the primary distinction being that in the JRE, the compiler, utility programs, and many necessary header files are not present.”
“Sun’s trademark license for usage of the Java brand insists that all implementations be “compatible”. This resulted in a legal dispute with Microsoft after Sun claimed that the Microsoft implementation did not support the RMI and JNI interfaces and had added platform-specific features of their own. Sun sued and won both damages in 1997 (some $20 million) and a court order enforcing the terms of the license from Sun. As a result, Microsoft no longer ships Java with Windows, and in recent versions of Windows, Internet Explorer cannot support Java applets without a third-party plugin. However, Sun and others have made available Java run-time systems at no cost for those and other versions of Windows.”
As it was, it was impossible to simply ship a JRE or a JDK in a distribution as-is, and it was impossible for people to debug and track bugs in the tradition of open source development against such a piece of software.
Apart from the last five percent, which we have heard nary anything from Sun on in the past two years other than “We’re working on it”. Net effect? You still needed a JRE or a JDK from Sun.
It was not impossible. Many distributions did so. It was also not impossible to debug and track bugs since the source code was available — just not under an open license.
Apart from the last five percent, which we have heard nary anything from Sun on in the past two years other than “We’re working on it”. Net effect? You still needed a JRE or a JDK from Sun. [/q]
If you had been involved with the OpenJDK effort, you would have heard a lot more than that.
I think you’re way too disconnected from the process.
Many is nothing compared to all distribution …
In certain case , in others it was the problem.
I know your not part of the process. Your even against the process. Your also disconnected from reality.
By being 100% GPL , it means JAVA will be used natively as opposed to a plug-in or an after tought.
Edited 2008-06-20 05:44 UTC
Not when you’re only counting distributions that matter.
Splitting hairs.
Sorry, but your statements go against publicly available evidence to the contrary. Thus, I will have to disagree.
It could be 100% bsd, and it will still have that chance. The license does not matter.
No , no , no , no , Many is nothing compared to all distribution. There is not one distribution that matter more then the other in GNU/Linux … BTW since it’s GPL other OS will be able to use it too …
No , it’s called reality … Sure java existed and Sun supported some platform on GNU/Linux but it was incomplete.
[/q]”Sorry, but your statements go against publicly available evidence to the contrary. Thus, I will have to disagree. ” [/q]
I guess I missed those non existent public evidence …
Feel free to show them , meaning give a link to them , because the existence of the complete 100% GPL solution show you as being wrong from every angle you have discussed so far …
Nope as there is no 100% BSD , I will say “yet” with the hope that one will appear but with BSD I have long seen reality and moved on , because there is no real demand or fund or community behind it. Otherwise someone would have jumped on-board or asked for it when the real job was being done … Sun was created by BSD people and yet they made sure there license kept the BSD out … Even the GNU/Linux developer dual license a lot of there software/driver to BSD.
Then you don’t have a problem with it being GPL then , well that’s not really the truth or reality as seen by your rant and whining so far.
License do matter for realist and pragmatist.
That’s why GNU/Linux is commercially supported as opposed to everything else and as commercial company worth billions and millions with recognized projects…
Pragmatic get the job done … 100% GPL , done.
BSD , well I am sure the parade of the “me too” beggar is about to start it’s worldwide tour soon … They will go on a political farce saying how BSD is as important as GNU/Linux is … I wonder where those people where all along when the project where discussed and started and the code got created …
You do know that the GPL is compatible with BSD , but that BSD refuse to include the code for “political” reasons …
Sorry, but that’s relative (so is reality, just ask a physicist).
Sorry, I guess I missed your non-existent public evidence too.
How does the existence of a “100% GPL solution” show me as being wrong from every angle?
The license does not matter.
You’re confusing the BSD operating systems and the BSD license. They are not the same.
I don’t have a problem with it being GPL. I never did. I was merely pointing out that it being GPL does not somehow make it a superior solution to a BSD one, etc.
Lots of other things that are not GPL also get the job done. Apache is NOT GPL at all, and it arguably gets the job done very well. It also has very strong commercial support.
The same goes for perl, Python, and many other things.
No, they refuse to include it because they don’t want their code to be forced to change licenses in certain cases.
They also care about the freedoms of their users, commercial and non-commercial.
Edited 2008-06-20 14:54 UTC
No.
Just read my previous comment … it’s you who said you had proof that you participated in coding the project and that it was written somewhere in full view for everyone to see.
1. It’s pragmatist , as it exist in code and solution instead of being a discussion.
2. It’s 100% GPL.
3. If there was no need for it , nobody would have funded the job to be done …
Yes it does , since your obviously having trouble with it being only GPL.
Your the one who is confused , There is more then one BSD “protection clause” for starter but yet none was used for the code that got created and released and the BSD community still seem yet to be absent from the code creation and the on going project.
You know your completely contradicting yourself and saying the opposite in your next phrase :
The fact that it exist and that none from the BSD community or under any of the BSD protection clause exist is kinda proving your wrong.
The problem is what you mentioned have directed ties with GNU/Linux for there success … None of witch owe there success to BSD or are BSD.
Your showing yourself as wrong here by proving here that license matter … Yet that’s not the point I made I said The GPL is compatible with BSD , and that for political reason they don’t want to include it with GPL code. The BSD always claim that there code is meant to be used by anyone and that they don’t care that there code get closed in derivatives yet you single out the GPL for what all other have done to it , because you don’t like that it’s the GPL that does something similar. It’s not forced either , as it’s not there code once they released it under the BSD. You want to keep it as your own and control who get to use it , don’t use the BSD protection clause.
No they don’t , they don’t have a real community or real commercial support and they just single out the GPL because unlike other license the code is not closed and unavailable in the derivatives.
So what it boils down to is you made a political rant and lot of useless whining and lied about the reality of things that will not change anything. There stil is a 100% GPL solution that exist.
You want it under the BSD or another license do the job that the FSF and GPL developper and SUN did. Apple as it’s own version why can’t you , oh that’s right , no community , no money , no developer …
Edited 2008-06-20 16:03 UTC
In short, you and I will just have to disagree.
I don’t believe you have sufficiently supported your arguments, and you don’t believe I have.
So, at an impasse we shall remain.
when it comes to fsf and free, its always politics.
the way they choose to word things may be inflamitory, blunt and tiresome if one follow the news. but in the end they get things done by sounding the alarm.
Well you are completely wrong.
1. Free Software is always better , it goes on more OS , more platform and is never obsolete.
2. The people you call pragmatist are not , pragmatist always have a problem when a big majority of possible client are unserved because of license or technical problems. If there was no huge real paying demand for it SUN would have ignored the demand.
3. The FSF and GPL are pragmatist and practical. Why else would a foundation exist , with a legal team to defend it and be in used and funded by some many peoples first and corporation with the same goal second.
You know the coward that you are part of always have the opportunity to band togheter get a lawyer and go against the FSF and GPL if it’s really harming and damaging your industry and your rights and products. But we both know they are not.
4. They both deserve the credit , Sun management for not listening to there developpers who said there was no problem and the one who fixed the “JAVA trap”.
Personnaly I know a lot of really good developper who are extremely happy that Java is now an option they can use to improve there Free Software solution.
Surely the inclusion natively of JAVA in GNOME , KDE , xfce , and others negate the noise and compelte irrealism that you and your ilk suffers.
You’re most certainly not a pragmatist, and you certainly qualify as being halfway deluded.
The JDK was always available to run on Linux. Sure, it was the x86 version and then later the x86-64 version also appeared. Nevertheless, it was always available.
Any desktop user who wanted to run Java could download Java directly from Sun or from the various non-free distro specific repositories. Any enterprise that wanted to run Java on their servers would run Java anyway (see the plethora of Java app servers for Linux).
The biggest problem with the closed source JDK was how little community feedback affected the JDK. See for example http://www.javalobby.org/articles/fixing-the-jdk/. After submitting a bug fix in the old days, you had to wait weeks and months before you heard back from somebody at Sun that your patch was accepted, if you were going to get feedback at all. This is different from other open source projects with a huge community, where feedback is almost instant. I think this slow response to the community’s needs is what an Open JDK addresses.
Don’t kid yourself that Java was open up so that the various “free” distros can include Java for “free”. You gotta ask yourself, as a commercial entity, how is that going to benefit Sun? On the other hand, an Open JDK will make the JDK respond much much quicker to community input, and that is a really awesome thing.
I guess I am not a pragamtist under the new and revised definition that say if you support the FSF and GPL your not pragmatist.
Not at all , as I am not you 😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)
“Sun distinguishes between its Software Development Kit (SDK) and Runtime Environment (JRE) that is a subset of the SDK, the primary distinction being that in the JRE, the compiler, utility programs, and many necessary header files are not present.”
That show you as wrong …
You still don’t get it …
There is now a 100% GPL version that can interact natively with all the existing GPL code and projects …
Your the one who is completely deluded.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT9423084269.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9815495-39.html
That’s only the beginning of what I had in mind.
How the hell does that prove him wrong? It has little to do with what he wrote.
You do know what a JDK is right?
JDK is a subset of Java SDK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JDK#Ambiguity_between_a_JDK_and_an_SDK
Which has been available for Linux many years.
I first used it at around 1.4 when I first started to use Linux. When it was first available for Linux I don’t know. But that fact is, that even without OpenJDK it has been possible to build and run Java code on Linux for many years.
His point was that the entire source code was always available from SUN … This show it was not …
It’s a direct list of what was missing on GNU/Linux.
Yes , something tell me you don’t know what the JAVA offer is and was. That’s why when you see some source code and you get to wrongly think it’s the complete offer.
“But that fact is, that even without OpenJDK it has been possible to build and run Java code on Linux for many years.”
Not by using Sun source code or there tools …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackdown_Java
Kaffe too come to mind …
GNU/Linux runs on a lot of platform and device that the Sun tools don’t support … Also the previous version where lacking features that the other SDK from other OS had.
http://community.java.net/linux/
Why do you think there are so many SDK and JVM and tools and IDE ? Because you think SUN was offering GNU/Linux it’s full feature on par with the other offer for other OS ? Answer is NO …
Another reality problem you guys have is that you don’t know on how many platform and device GNU/Linux run on and when the tool don’t support because it don’t identify it and you cant modify it , your toast until SUN decide to get around to support it. Not anymore …
It has nothing to do with that.
Did you even read the text you were quoting?
It’s a direct list what’s missing from the JRE compared with the SDK.
It says nothing about what the JDK is missing under Linux.
It does seem odd that I can download this old java 1.4.2 sdk from Sun, since those tools shouldn’t exists.
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html
Edited 2008-06-20 14:36 UTC
I guess , I disagree with you there.
Yes and I understood it too , that seem to be your problem …
Right , for you to agree it as to say GNU/Linux somewhere , because your unable to understand the point being made …
Right , and because you say they should not exist that did not became the reality … How strange.
Missing source code and tools and ide and features don’t means nothing exist …
That doesn’t make your claims right.
No that must be your since you clearly don’t understand what the text says. The text you are quoting, mentions specificly SDK and JRE. It say absolutely nothing about what is missing under Linux.
Well it atleast has to mention something other then
“Sun distinguishes between its Software Development Kit (SDK) and Runtime Environment (JRE) that is a subset of the SDK, the primary distinction being that in the JRE, the compiler, utility programs, and many necessary header files are not present.”
What of that can be understood in anyother way then:
SDK has the compiler, utility programs and many necessary header files. The JRE doesn’t have those features.
You claimed they didn’t exist, they did.
Source code could be downloaded for Java SDK 1.3.1 under a non-open source academic license.
With that source it was possible to atudy how Javas API worked, how the hotspot JVM worked and most of everything else that was a part of Java SDK and JRE.
And all what Sun provided it was possible, to develop java applications under Linux.
The only thing you couldn’t do was to fix bugs the JRE or SDK and distribute the fixes.
what more tools do you need? You have a compiler, utilities for making distributable applications, you have en runtime environment and you have full API documentation.
Or as we say in English: “I know you are, but what am I?”
In your opinion, perhaps.
I disagree. There are thousands of free software projects that are obsolete, abandoned, and do not work on more than one platform.
Perhaps you do not believe them to be pragmatic, but I believe they are.
I don’t understand what you wrote. You’ve jumbled together several different ideas into two different paragraphs.
Personal insults are never an acceptable form of reasoning.
Java was always an option. Some people just didn’t like the solution.
That was supposed to be sarcasm, right?
What I’d like to know is, where is Sun in all of this? It’s nice that Red Hat and others have stepped forward with IcedTea to get towards a completely free implementation with OpenJDK, but why haven’t Sun done that already? It’s been over two years, and there hasn’t been a peep out of Sun about getting the JDK (and the code) they produce as a completely open sourced and free implementation.
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=…
Because Redhat was already working on it ? 🙂
With Sun contributing 95% of the code I think we can safely say they’ve lived up to their part of the bargain.
Meanwhile Sun seems to be busy with JDK 7:
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/
Red Hat was already working on Harmony and Classpath. So what?
So Sun were committed to open sourcing 95% of Java at the time, but not the full 100% as they had implied? That’s all you had to say.
If Sun could have, they would have opensourced all 100% of it; the simply fact of the matter, in this place I like to called reality, it isn’t that simple. Sun gave 95% of the source code of Java, because they owned 95% (or were able to arrange the opening of a certain amount) of the code – and that is all they are entitled to opening up.
Sun didn’t own the last 5%. It wasn’t theirs to open. They were committed to opening as much as the had the legal right to do so. Many parts of that 5% were not available under any other terms.
Where is Sun in all this? Oh, I don’t know, actively working with the community to resolve these issues?
Let’s not forget that they contributed 95% of the code here…
From the post:
“Working with Sun Microsystems and the broader Open Source Java community; Red Hat’s OpenJDK team included Tom Fitzsimmons, Lillian Angel, Gary Benson, Keith Seitz, Mark Wielaard and Andrew Haley.”
So, yes… they worked with Sun on this, that’s where Sun was.
.. source.
Of the 4-5% of remaining closed parts (Java sound, java.color.* classes, font and antialised shape rasterizer being the major pieces) Sun actually contributed the majority – color, font and AA shape rasterizer.
It would be nice if it was recognized a bit more in TFA.
Dmitri
Java2D Team
I hate the fact that I can’t mod you up after posting. Kudos to you and your team for working hard on open sourcing the Swing related stuff.
I fully agree, so I modded the grandparent up before replying. Kudos go out to you! Thanks!
(A happy user
)
Sun’s been happily contributing all the time to OpenJDK.
I’d suggest following the respective mailing lists of the OpenJDK project if you are really interested in weighing contributions in the OpenJDK community by their employers. Suffice to say that developers employed at Sun have been very active at removing the remaining encumbrances over the past year, as have developers employed by Red Hat or other companies.
It’s how community efforts work: you work together on shared goals. Sun is working closely with others on OpenJDK, which is why it only took a couple of months after the inception of OpenJDK6 this year for a distribution to have its own build pass the compatibility test suite.
From what I understand Sun plans to make Java 7 completely open source from the ground up and left others to finish work on converting Java 6 to using fully open standards.
Rellay nice. Now OpenJDK is a viable alternative, at least for desktop use.
For server use, I think that not implementing snmp is going to kill the usefulness of OpenJDK Linux integration.
How do you monitor (through Nagios) something that has no SNMP implementation?
On a side note, OpenJDK 1.6 works correctly with Compiz and Fusion, where the sun 1.6 showd the gray window bug. This should be a bug fix backported from Sun Java 1.7
but was stopped by Microsoft: “It is not fair that one single company has that much power over a standard” (OOXML anyone?). This proves that SUN for long has tried to open and standardize Java.
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/09/microsoft-conde.html
The reason it took long time for SUN to open up Java, was that SUN had to prove that they owned each of the 6 million lines of code. That took hard work and time. But they did it.
Now, we all see that SUN has radically changed course under their new CEO. The old CEO Scott McNealy was a less sympathic man. He would never had open sourced and given away anything. But the new CEO is a different person. SUN is different now.
Really, I couldn’t care less. I’ve been using Java for 12 years, and I was always able to do what I want with it. I doubt that serious business application developers and their customers are going to trust JDK built by some GNU freak.
Perhaps, there is some startup performance gain if JRE is with other system libraries, instead of using its own versions, but, again I don’t care.
Perhaps, it has some sense for multimedia projects, but native libraries can be linked via JNI anyway.
All in all, the only effect that I see is that 3 letter ‘G’, ‘P’ and ‘L’ can put developers and customers on alert. SUN could have done other useful things instead of wasting time and effort with this.
DG
“I doubt that serious business application developers and their customers are going to trust JDK built by some GNU freak.”
I just had to reply to this.
GNU code is all over enterprise software development – gcc, glibc, Emacs, GTK+, various shells, various services, etc, the list is endless – and it’s deployed not only on Linux servers, but Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and even Windows.
GNU code is virtually ubiquitous in Enterprise software development, whether people realize it or not.
Also, the FSF has a multitude of large corporate sponsors – SUN, Intel, HP, just to name three of them.
And the term “GNU freak” is typical flaming form so-called self-titled “pragmatists”.
Face it, some of the worlds greatest software developers work for (yes, they have paid developers), or contribute to, the FSF and GNU.
Also face the fact that some of the worlds greatest and most widely used software comes from the FSF and GNU.
Sure, Stallman is a radical idealist and is more concerned about political and moral issues than technical ones, and that rubs a lot of people the wrong way (including me sometimes). But truly world class code, and extremely widely used code, has come from that man, and the people who work with him.
Anyway, back to the topic of the thread.
I’ve always just used the JRE or JDK straight from SUN, whether on Windows or Linux, with no problems. A completely “free” GPL version never meant that much to me, at least directly.
But I’m extremely glad that there is now a completely free, GPL, fully functional version of the JRE and JDK out there. This will mean more distribution of Java, more community involvment, and more innovation (just look at how open source projects like Spring and Hibernate revolutionized the Java Enterprise space).
Having a totally “free as in speech”, GPL version of Java is a great thing, whether indifferent Java developers care to recognize it or not.
Edited 2008-06-20 16:57 UTC
“But I’m extremely glad that there is now a completely free, GPL, fully functional version of the JRE and JDK out there. This will mean more distribution of Java, more community involvment, and more innovation (just look at how open source projects like Spring and Hibernate revolutionized the Java Enterprise space).”
I just quoted myself there.
I wanted to expand on this point, because it’s very important.
Any experienced J2EE developer has probably experienced the pain of the EJB 2.x spec. It was horrible – super complicated, lot’s of moving parts, heavy, difficult to test, could on be deployed in a EJB container (which meant long start up time of the J2EE app server), and on and on. Pretty much everyone hated it. Entity beans were particularly painful, being slow and having a convoluted, lousy implementation of object relational mapping.
Then along came the non-standard, open source Spring project, which revolutionized the “POJO” approach, utilizing dependency injection.
Also along came the non-standard, open source Hibernate project, which revolutionized Java enterprise persistence, taking a smooth, elegant ORM implementation.
Everyone who could, jumped on the Spring/Hibernate bandwagon because it rescued Java devs from “EJB 2.x hell”. Along the way, Spring and Hibernate became de-facto standards.
Then the Java standards process reacted to this phenomenon by coming out with the new EJB 3.0 and JPA specs, which are reflections of the Spring and Hibernate POJO approach, and massive improvements over EJB 2.x.
Now Spring/Hibernate compete for developer mindshare with EJB 3.0 and JPA. Just look at some of the threads on JavaLobby and TheServerSide to see passionate Java devs argue over which is better (and both sides have great points).
But the overall point of this history lesson is that innovation came from outside of SUN, or the other big Java vendors. It came from independant, non-standard, open source projects. The standard corporate, SUN driven JSR proved inadequate in producing a usable spec, or improving it. The improvements came from the open source community, then the standards responded in kind.
With a totally free, GPL, not-patent-encumbered JRE and JDK, the same can happen with JSE (standard Java) as did with JEE (enterprise Java).
Case in point, Java 2d and Swing.
While SUN finally made improving Swing a priority, and it has shown, Swing improvement and development has proven slow and behind the times. In fact, SUN made improving Swing a priority after IBM came out with Eclipse and SWT. Now, the rest of the open source community can take Swing and run with it, and improve it, speed it up, improve look and feel, etc.
Great stuff, I think.
I doubt anyone would want to read that long essay of yours, me neither. Thanks for the feedback, but I’ve already seen too much GNU agitprop in my life.
DG
> …and I was always able to do what I want with it…
Well, there was problems regarding limitations that you can’t change Sun libraries (code nor distributed jars). I can remember one of the projects where we completely rewrote a whole bunch of code just to be able to fix some bugs in Swing library that was critical to our software instead of correcting about 10 erroneous code lines in Sun code. If I remember it right, it was JDK 1.3.? and something with Focus-Management between some closed AWT-based components and our Swing applications.
> …All in all, the only effect that I see is that 3 letter ‘G’, ‘P’ and ‘L’ can put developers and customers on alert…
True. GPL wouldn’t save the day in the described case as it’s not free for those who can’t (or don’t want to) open the changed code. For that (very big and bureaucratic) issurance company I was talking about decision to open their code/patches/whatever would never find place. Submit changes and wait for the next version would not be a solution too.
I think that users were allowed to make changes to JDK source code in the past. They were just not allowed to distribute them.So, I think that you could correct the errors if you wanted.
DG
.
From the JDK 1.3.1 license (2. RESTRICTIONS):
“… Unless enforcement is prohibited by applicable
law, you may not modify, decompile, or reverse engineer
Software. …”
Also interesting (same license):
“… Except as specifically authorized in any Supplemental License Terms, you may not make copies of Software, other than a single copy of Software for archival purposes. …”
A very important thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that apart from it being free now, it will remain so forever. Sun will probably be around longer than .. the sun (har har har), but you never know. Or what if Sun suddenly decided to turn its back on the Java community? That’s not really an issue anymore, the community could fork the last GPL version and maintain / improve it themselves.
I think it should be obvious by now that Sun has had a very consistent message on open source for the last couple of years. There has been no going back despite the enormous cost of open sourcing most of their crown jewels (Java, Solaris, etc.).
Their current CEO promised that everything Sun does would be open source, and it looks like they’re making good on those promises as they can do so.
Do you guys and gals remember when Richard did a short stint in a video for Sun following the announcement that Sun had decided to GPL Java ?
I can only imagine how happy Richard was on that day. He had every reason to be so. Not simply because Sun had chosen to use his license for Java-but rather because of a little bit of historical trivia that most Free Software users are too young to remember.
Now surely you know the name James Gosling. He was the one who created Java. But did you know that there is a rather interesting relationship between him and Richard ?
One of the single biggest reasons that Richard wrote the GPL and created what we now know as Free Software has everything to do with James Gosling.
http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/
Many people who are ignorant of this history have always been affronted by Stallman’s use of the phrase “Java Trap”. But is it really any wonder that Richard chose to use that expression-given what personally had transpired between him and James Gosling.
Bill Joy was the cofounder of Sun Microsystems. He is also the guy who originally wrote Vi. Bill Joy was also friends with James Gosling- and made Gosling’s baby practically synonymous with the name Sun.
This little bit of trivia adds a whole lot to all of the flamefests over the years about Emacs vs. Vi. SunOS, which we now know as OpenSolaris, was the first heavily commercialized version of what we now know as BSD. Bill Joy used the code written at Berkley to create the original SunOS.
That Java is now GPL is nothing less than Sun saying to Richard-“Richard, you were right”. And if one day OpenSolaris embraces the GPL Richard’s victory will be complete.
You may think this is nothing but propaganda-but I encourage you to actually *learn* about the history of these giants of the computer world.
Now that the OpenJDK is %100 Free, %100 GPL, Richard has received the kind of vindication that hardly *anyone* in life ever gets. Cheers to you Richard and Cheers to Sun for seeing the light.
Thanks for the interesting information. It sounds like an episode of James Burke’s “Connections”
Excellent post. Good reading. I was aware of a Gosling / Stallman connection, and that both were involved with Emacs in some capacity. But I didn’t know it ran that deep.
I remember seeing that Stallman video, that they ran at the Sun press conference announcing the open sourcing of Java.
Stallman looked very very pleased indeed.
“I doubt anyone would want to read that long essay of yours, me neither. Thanks for the feedback, but I’ve already seen too much GNU agitprop in my life.”
Basically you’re saying
“I’m not interested in reading anything that might contradict my pre-conceived notions, so I’ll label it stuff like agitprop to discredit it”.
I will concede that my post was rather long-winded, however.
Basically, I am saying that I’ve read many similar articles (judging by first couple lines). All you people are saying same things over and over. I think that they are all agitprop. In fact, Internet is polluted with GNU propaganda. Why would I bother to read another version of the same story ? Have you revealed something essentially new and groundbreaking to the world population ?
DG
Not new to most, but new to you apparently.
My post was merely pointing out facts, nothing else. GNU software is in widespread use, including in large corporations. The FSF is supported financially by large corporations. Stallman is a world class programmer, as are many who program for GNU. Those are all facts, other than calling Stallman a world class programmer (which is subjective). But most people would consider someone who writes their own compiler, and large library, among many other things, a world class programmer.
Also, agitprop is defined as communist propaganda. Giving such as label to GNU is fairly typical mindless trolling by the anti-FSF crowd.
Stallman himself has always said business is good, that companies can use free software, that it’s okay making money off software.
He just wants the GPL honored, just like any other license. And the GPL comes with it’s own set of restrictions, just like any other license.
The very fact that the FSF, and GNU software, is supported by large corporations, and is in widespread use by large corporations, is proof beyond any shadow of a doubt that they have absolutely nothing to do with communism.
So grow up, and develop a brain, and some integrity while you’re at it, or STFU.