“Today, we are open-sourcing Sun’s server side implementation of Java,” Schwartz told an audience of about 10,000 software developers and Sun partners. “This is the first step in open-sourcing all of Sun’s Java software assets.” It will be released under Sun’s CDDL.
Wow. Good job Sun. Almost makes me wish I would have pursued a co-op there in CS rather than in EE. Bravo!
Sounds promising. Will see if they follow through.
[i]”Sounds promising. Will see if they follow through.”[i]
Well they followed through with OpenSolaris. I don’t think they are going to come out with blatant lies, tends to get the marketing department a little upset amongst other things.
Is CDDL compatible with GPL?
Sun have been pondering the posibility of Open Sourcing Java but it seems like the posibility of an Apache version of java forced there hand, will be interesting to see how long it takes for J2 Standard Edition to have the code released.
Will be interesting for the industry, firstly it will posibly kill the apache java project if J2SE is released fast enough.
GNOME have been discussing moving to a higher level language, one of the prime candidates was Java, however the closed source nature was considered a major problem, this may tip the ballance.
It will be interesting to see Red Hats reaction, as they have been the bigest proponents of GCJ, as an alternitive to the JVM. They can either keep developing the open stack, or adopt what will become even more standard on other distros.
All in all I think this is good news, IANAL but the CDDL seems reasonable, and is aproved by the OSI. I think this will definatly boost Java on OSS Operating Systems, and will trickle back to windows, should more OSS apps be written in Java. This is probibly the best move Sun could ever make against .net becomming a major standard.
Next step would be the VM itself, how long will it take before every distribution is java-enabled…
they have been the bigest proponents of GCJ, as an alternitive to the JVM
Do note that licensing was not (by far) only reason to be interested in GCJ: the ability to compile java code is still very attractive imho.
For more insight into what Schwartz is really up to at Sun, read one of his recent entries on Solaris’s big move:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=inevitability
Are you trying to troll? It is basically true that there are thriving communities around Apache and the BSDs, because lots of people simply find the GPL too confining. There really is nothing wrong with what Schwartz said, as he is speaking to a specific audience, which you may or may not be a part of. Sun is aiming for an Apache/BSD/Mozilla-like experience around the CDDL code bases, where the licensing is explicitly business-friendly and easy for developers to adopt.
Back when I programmed professionally, I always favored Apache/BSD licensed code over GPL code. First, it just removes entire classes of legal problems, and in a bureaucratic company that means the difference between getting something done or getting nothing done. Second, nearly all of my changes are relevant to the project at hand and not relevant to the purpose of the original code. And, third, I actually did contrubute back some stuff, anyway, because sometimes it’s better to have stuff fixed in the main repository.
IMO, the availability of business-friendly code bases is a huge win for OSS, because it drives adoption in ways that often would be awkward with the GPL. This is how a free market of software should work, and it’s healthy to have several licenses to work with.
> Is CDDL compatible with GPL?
Weeeeell, strictly speaking the only gpl-compatible license is gpl itself
However CDDL is osi-approved so I guess the answer is yes.
But keep in mind that is’ viral like GPL, so you better read it carefully and like it before you start working with it.
finally… a balance of open and close?
To me so far CDDL is a good start. Although i don’t trust sun 100%.
Hopefully the VM will be CDDL before Version 6. Which will really get it some needed improvement.
One can develop GPL applications that link against CDDL code. The CDDL is a lot like the LGPL so you can make any type of application (open, close, gpl, bsd, whatever) that relies on CDDL licensed Java.
Now, you can’t create a GPL licensed fork of this open source Java. If you make modifications to the OSS Java code, it must be CDDL’d or compatible. The reason that the CDDL is incompatible with the LGPL are for things like patent grants. the CDDL requires that people are allowed to use your patents if you put code in a CDDL program that uses that patent. With the GPL/LGPL, you could patent things you contributed to a GPL project and then enforce that patent against the project. The FSF says that they don’t consider patent grants a bad thing, but patent grants do make them incompatible with the GPL version 2.
The CDDL is a fine license unless you want to fork it into a GPL version (and you don’t mind that people can link against CDDL’d code in an LGPL-like fashion). A lot of people don’t like the license because they wanted to use Solaris code in the Linux kernel and the patent grant makes it incompatible. Suffice it to say, this license allows Java to be ported to any OS and for any licensed program to use it – which should be the goal of any free programming language.
> Is CDDL compatible with GPL?
Weeeeell, strictly speaking the only gpl-compatible license is gpl itself
——-
Factually incorrect
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicens…
Dozens of Free software licenses are compatible with GPL
From that gnu link:
|
| [snip] We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.
|
| Also unfortunate in the CDDL is its use of the term “intellectual property”.
|
BTW, a couple of links I found:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1739000,00.asp
http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/01/31/1310231&tid=29
Someone called me on this in another thread, and it bears repeating.
There are two details WRT Suns projects with the CDDL.
The first is the CDDL is pretty straightforward, and I think not a bad license.
But the second has to do with participating with Sun projects, which has its own issues.
To participate in a Sun project, you need to cede Copyright to Sun (to be fair, you need to share copyright). This lets them take your contributions and relicense them (i.e. they can take the code, put it under a more restrictive license, and release it).
So, while the CDDL compels code release for CDDL licensed code, since Sun can take the code (and only Sun, since only you and they have the copyright), and do with it what they will.
Now, to be fair, the CDDL offers an out for that. You only need to cede copyright if you wish to play in their sandbox, not to use CDDL. There’s no reason you can’t fork the project, keep it under strict CDDL (like Linux and GPL, which has a gazillion individual copyrights). Even better, Sun can’t stop you from merging their code base into your fork, under the CDDL.
So, the CDDL license isn’t a real issue, but some may have issues with the Sun communities. And I understand why they ask for the copyright, it does clean up a bunch of messy claims, I just wish that the copyright was given to a more open foundation, rather than simply Sun.
Sun are simply a reactive company, and that’s their problem.
This is just a response to the sorts of things Red Hat have planned for Java, and most of all, the Harmony project initiated by Apache. Sun knows that Apache has the power and standing to basically make Harmony the standard implementation everyone tests against first. I can imagine that worried Sun quite a bit (and it seemed to irk James Gosling), hence the above CDDL licensing of Java (just the server-side mind you).
I doubt whether any of this will make any difference to how things are done now or the way they’re heading.
“Dozens of Free software licenses are compatible with GPL”
Yes, but it is important that everyone understands what this means: the combined codebase must be GPL, irrevocably so.
The GPL has a giant sucking sound about it that is perfectly fine for many things, but people need to understand its implications before they act.
“Dozens of Free software licenses are compatible with GPL”
Yes, but it is important that everyone understands what this means: the combined codebase must be GPL, irrevocably so.
—–
errr. Not true. You need to brush up your reading of copyright laws. it doesnt work that way. Just one FAQ that covers this topic. You need to understand better the implications
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
akula wrote:
> [snip] but it seems like the posibility of an Apache version of java forced there hand,
then David wrote:
> This is just a response to the sorts of things Red Hat have planned for Java,
> and most of all, the Harmony project initiated by Apache. Sun knows that
> Apache has the power and standing to basically make Harmony the standard
> implementation everyone tests against first.
Huh?
Sun is probably much more scared of the GNU implementation (GCJ + Classpath) than a possibly emerging Apache version. Especially considering how far things have come with Fedora Core 4. You can install that with Eclipse, Tomcat, Struts, and a bunch of other stuff and it all just runs under GCJ/gij.
More and more Java software is running every day under GCJ. Besides the server stuff, there’s more and more regular news about the Swing implementation coming online soon as well.
*That* is what Sun fears — GCJ/Classpath: a working, shipping, robust Java implementation. Not an unknown quantity like Harmony.
They feared a fork, so they kept it closed. Now they’re going to pay the price for that with the GNU implementation rapidly becoming viable. You can’t just design a really nice language/platform like that, show it to the free software community (“look but don’t touch”), and just expect them to let you keep it all to yourself.
Sun is probably much more scared of the GNU implementation (GCJ + Classpath) than a possibly emerging Apache version.
Apache’s Harmony will more than likely have GCJ and Classpath as its elements, and there have been discussions between people on the project and the people at GNU working on Classpath. Harmony will bring all of that togther in one complete implementation and give it the backing of Apache, which is what Sun is really afraid of. GNU by itself won’t get people using this but Apache really would, so no, it’s not the GNU Sun is afraid of at all.
Have a read around about it before commenting.
“Dozens of Free software licenses are compatible with GPL”
Yes, but it is important that everyone understands what this means: the combined codebase must be GPL, irrevocably so.
—–
errr. Not true. You need to brush up your reading of copyright laws. it doesnt work that way. Just one FAQ that covers this topic. You need to understand better the implications
Your link covers the difference between bundling applications under disparate licensing and actually linking to GPL code. In the latter case, which one would call a combined codebase, the code which was linked is forever GPL.
I heard about plans from Sun to release their app server under an open source license earlier this year, before the Harmony effort was announced. Given how long such plans can take in a large company with a non-trivial codebase to actually happen, I would not assume that GlassFish is not a reaction to Harmony.
If a reaction at all, it may be a reaction to JBoss and JOnAS successfully getting certified last year. In a funny conincidence, the GlassFish under CDDL announcement comes as JOnAS on gcj arrives into fedora core. See http://gnu.wildebeest.org/diary/index.php?p=95 .
cheers,
dalibor topic
I would not assume that GlassFish
*is* a raction to Harmony.
Need Coffee.
cheers,
dalibor topic