This article discusses a topic that is often discussed among Java developers, and raised as a problem with Java’s license by GPL advocates. What would happen to Java if Sun were to go out of business or be aquired by another company? Unfortunately, the article really doesn’t give any answers. It only raises more questions and leaves room for lots of discussion.
What would happen to Java if Sun…
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Probably the same thing if Microsoft went out of buisness…
There are a lot of people that make their daily living servicing microsoft product. Yet somehow, I don’t think Microsoft will ever GPL Windows and other Microsoft Products. It’s a stupid.
Anyhow, IF Sun ever goes belly up, then just grap the specification and make it a standard. There are noone to make any legal threads about it…
Why GPL Java ? What could possible make it better ? I can’t understand that, what would make Java better by open source it ? All classes are kinda open, you can look at the source code if you want, it is just the JVM that you can’t see the source. Hope someone can explain it to me without trolling.
Another question, are there any good java RAD tools out there, that would behave close to Delphi or C++ Builder ? Where you can draw your own windows and create the needed backend classes ? All I can see is a RAD for creating JSP and I am not interested in that.
bah, can’t edit posts… nuke last sentence of first paragraph
…and if someone aquires Sun, just use their version or go use .NET. GPL’ing Java isn’t the solution for everything!
For some things, not all, but some and IMHO I can’t see that just by open sourcing java will solve anything.
And about my question on a RAD, I am running Linux and Mac X, no Windows here
If Sun were to go out of business than Java would be killed off. It would be illegal to use it. I think that it is insane to learn Java unless it is GPLed. Why throw all that time learning the API’s in the garbage. This was my original argument many months ago, I felt that GPL’ing Java would ensure it’s long term use, than Java could never die. It appears that people are finally asking the question, well the answer is that if Java is the property of Sun, and if Sun goes under, than Java goes under, end of story! Learn Perl, Python or C or C++ and boost, etc. Those libraries will be around for a long long time.
I am not really sure if Java would die should SUN go down the drain. There are a lot of companies out there which rely heavily on Java. Take IBM for example. I am sure they wouldn’t let Java die and just step aside.
And if they pushed Objective-C. Read more about it and try
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/32963.html
http://www.linuks.mine.nu/gnustep/
http://www.petitiononline.com/laafs/petition.html
Read some politics (copied from the GNUstep group at orkut.com), send me a mail for invitation
http://www.linuks.mine.nu/gnustep/sun/
We would have much better a Office Suite
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/OpenWrite.gif
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Quantrix.gif
Basically nothing big, somebody else probably IBM would take over.
The funny thing is, Java does not belong to Sun anymore, it belongs to the JCP and Sun has the leading role in there.
But the who is who of the IT industry except Microsoft and lots of inidividuals are members of the JCP, so if Sun goes down the JCP still will live on, and IBM will take the lead role.
That will happen.
I don’t have an oppinion wether java should be gpl-ed or not.But wtf , should Sun go down the drain why would using java would be illegal? And if that happens , well , back to the good ole’ C/C++
Another question, are there any good java RAD tools out there, that would behave close to Delphi or C++ Builder ? Where you can draw your own windows and create the needed backend classes ? All I can see is a RAD for creating JSP and I am not interested in that.
Netbeans ? Eclipse + plugins ? Borland JBuilder ?
If Sun ever became bankrupt, they would either GPL Java, or sell it to a company like IBM or Apple. Even Microsoft might buy it, never to develop it further, to give their own languages a greater chance of success.
I really can’t see Java just passively dying – there would be no logical reason for that at all.
IBM has zero rights to Java. IBM could not take over Java, this is impossible. IBM has urged Sun to license Java under the GPL, but Sun has total control over the future of Java. Believing that Sun would give Java to the GPL if Sun went out of business is fictional. IBM could do nothing, absolutely nothing, it has no control.
Still I hear no arguments for why java should be gpl-ed or not. Why isn’t there like a good GTK/KDE for Java, why is everyone trying to beat their heads and try to make .NET on Linux instead of using java ? We don’t have 1 but atleast 2 major undertakings of porting C# and .NET over, why ? We have all the frameworks needed in JAVA ? WHY opensource java ? Don’t answer something like, “in case sun goes down”, if sun goes down, well then it goes down and java will still be here. SUN will not go down in 1 day, not unexpected, the owners of sun would never ever want java to go down with it, they have spent to much money on R&D in java, they would either sell it or start a new company with java, and besides, if SUN does die and close their doors in one day, totally unexpected, the reciever ship that controls the bankrupt sun will sell everything down to the last keyboard that sun has, AND that would include JAVA. Stop this noncense
If Sun goes down, than Java goes down. No further development is possible.
Also Java is a product line (an assembly line) and if it became GPL’ed it would become a community project, which is different.
Java is an assembly line for the production of commercial solutions. It’s just an assembly line. It’s not even an ideal assembly line, but it is established, apparently ideal intermediate (IR) representation is not transparent…yet.
If Sun went bankrupt, why would anyone buy Java? There are other assembly lines out there. The ideal assembly line of the future is the final IR.
It all comes down to money. Do you really think Java will go if SUN goes ? Don’t be naive. Java has cost SUN millions of dollars in R&D and salary and marketing and so on. Why would anyone want to just throw that away ? The owners of SUN would never allow that to happen (and I am not talking about Scott McNealy here).
All classes are kinda open, you can look at the source code if you want, it is just the JVM that you can’t see the source.
You can actually download the entire J2SE source code, including the JVM from http://wwws.sun.com/software/communitysource/j2se/java2/download.ht…
What the open source people want is for the source code to be GPL, and not licensed under SCSL. With the current SCSL, you can only view the source code but you can’t make your own patch and then distribute that patch. You need to submit the patch back to Sun for them to integrate it into the Java platform. the problem is, this normally takes a long time and sometimes patches just get ignored.
It doesn’t all come down to money, as I’ve said before, money is based on a fiat system, money is not real, what it does come down to in reality is “control”, the representation of control is money, and Sun does not want to give up control, and that’s one of the reasons why Java is already dead. What FOSS has to do is look at a technology, associate a metaphor with it, and find its utility. Once the value is found, than some form of directional strategy can be developed.
Stop being a troll. Why would anyone buy Java? Perhaps because it’s arguably the most popular language at the moment where loads of businesses have millions if not billions of $$$ worth of code written in it.
You should also consider the fact that many universities teach Java as a first programming language so for better or for worse (usually worse) many graduates leave university knowing Java. This alone means there is ample supply of Java programmers and it makes no sense to just kill the technology.
There are many open sourced Java-compatibly VMs available at the moment. SableVM, Kaffe and even GCJ are all open sourced implementations of the Java language. If Sun went belly up and decided to take Java down with them, what’s to stop IBM, BEA, Oracle and Fujitsu from picking up one of these projects and carrying on the work?
Go check http://www.jcp.org/ for why Java will not die or be illegal to use if Sun ever dies (someone else already pointed this out, but maybe a link will make you actually check it out).
make a research or poll in real Java developers (not the people who only bashes it) who uses open source products, most of them will oppose a GPL’ed Java (my guess is more than %90), and again most of them will oppose a java base that can be forked. As for seing the code, it is already open, unlike MS .net .
To me, java only should be more open to the public contribution (Better bug-issue tracking system, better patching mechanism etc.), and should be distributed easier. but changes should be applied, desicions should be made by an authority.
Sun goes down java goes down arguments are flat stupid..
…”Another question, are there any good java RAD tools out there, that would behave close to Delphi or C++ Builder ? Where you can draw your own windows and create the needed backend classes ? All I can see is a RAD for creating JSP and I am not interested in that.”
What is this , where have you lived the last 3-4 years?
Java RAD tools have evolved so much that you cannot even think at Delphi and C++ Builder(take JBuilder for example if you are so familiar with Borland products as it seems you are).
A better discusion for you would have been about the java development framework itself.
But with you … i gues it will go into trolling.(in fact i am sure)
Borland’s JBuilder
http://borland.com/jbuilder/
Eclipse w/ Visual Editor plugin
http://www.eclipse.org
Neither of those is quite up to Delphi/VS GUI design, but they are a good start. JBuilder has a performance advantage at the moment and is really designed around GUI stuff. While Eclipse is a better all around tool.
I can’t see how so many would be against Java being GPL’d. And I am talking the JVM’s here. Imagine experts all over the world being able to see and fix the JVMs for which they are experts in. Imagine how quickly things would be fixed. Obviously, you’d need someone like a Linus Torvalds to be the benevolent dictator of such a project and to coordinate changes amongst all the different OS platform JVMs. But I just can’t see the downside of that. People scream the product would be forked and you’d have all these different JVMs floating around out there. Funny, I don’t see hijacked Linux kernels all over the net. Yes I can take a Linux kernel and modify it. But if I distribute it without submitting my changes to Linus, I lose my license. If I do submit my changes and my kernel takes off in popularity, then the community will see the validity and it will get accepted by Linus.
If Java would be GPLed then it would be really free.
You can speculate what would happen if Sun goes down, but
nobody knows.
Microsoft + Fujitsu Siemens + Sun Microsystems = Infinite future!
You can do pretty much all that you’ve said today. You can see the Java source code, you can modify it, but you can’t distribute your modifications. You have to submit them back to Sun and it is up to them to incorporate your changes into the JVM.
So what’s the point of the GPL again?
I don’t understand all this talk about GPL’ing Java. I mean, what exactly are you GPL’ing? The JVM? The compiler suite? The API’s?
If you GPL a language, then wouldn’t the viral nature of the GPL then insist that all programs written with that GPL’d language be required to be GPL’d themselves?
Oh wait, now that I’m thinking about this more. I’m sure what’s getting GPL’s is the compiler suite and the libraries right? Okay, now that I can understand. Is that it though? Wait a minute, but then if you write programs that use the GPL’d libraries then again the viral nature of the GPL would require that your programs are GPL’d as well. Damn. Can’t win!
Okay, so the libraries can be LGPL’d and the compiler suite and JVM can be GPL’d. That would be okay, wouldn’t it? Then I can write commercial software and keep my IP protected, right?
Personally, I think they should BSD license it if SUN goes belly-up. Although, I’m sure people would be afraid of Java forking and stuff like that. Although, that should’t be too much of a worry. If the project is strong (strong leadership, strong marketing, strong goals), people won’t use forks anyway. They’ll stick to using sporks.
Well, the restriction on distribution doesn’t jive well with the tenets of Free and Open Source software.
As long as the option of forking (for whatever reason) is barred, the FOSS community at large will not use Java as a fundamental building block.
FOSS needs the plumbing to be Free, so that it’s shielded against the changing winds of corporate strategies.
This is why Mono is taking off. Allthough its MS technology, the specs leave room enough to come up with a Free and compatible implementation.
The point I was trying to make was that the main argument for the GPL, i.e. you get to see the source code and patch it up is pretty much bunk. You can do that today, but the caveat is that you can’t distribute your patch, and the only way to see your patch incorporated into the JVM is to submit the patch to Sun.
Most developers don’t really care about open sourcing Java and it is highly unlikely that Sun will open up Java just to cater to the demands of certain Free software advocates.
That is not really correct. if you are a real paranoid and want to close your eyes to thousands of quality java open source (free as freedom) application, there are free (as freedom) and open source( can be changed and redistributed) java implementations if you do not like to use the free (as beer) and open source (as you can see, download code) Sun Java. that is why i am amazed Linux users to see it more dangerous than on a technology developed by microsoft (that you cannot see their code at all) with shady patent issues.. You are expecting microsoft to approach a real contender with tender and care? check the history please..
I think sun should do like zope did with python. Build a separate foundation who control IP, patent, evolution and developpement. It will have no need of open sourcing it, but will remain vendor independent and standarized(?).
Why do you want to reinvent the wheel? While Java is way better than .NET in terms of Enterprise Business Application architecture, it is also cross-platform!! What you need are all in Java, why do people want something else? What about we change the question to: What if Microsoft goes down after longhorn comes out? Then lovely Penguin + Java rule the world!!!
I don’t get it. You never hear anyone wanting to GPL Fortran, COBOL, ANSI C. What’s the deal with these new fangled languages, (Java, .NET, Python, etc.)? What’s next, license English, French, or Swahili….
You shouldn’t be able to “license” ANY language. License a logo, license a particular compiler or IDE, but the language itself, that’s nuts.
Let’s see if I get this straight, Sun in their infinite wisdom wants to keep control over Java to keep it from forking. To prevent someone like Microsoft from creating J++ that’s almost, but not quite compatible with Sun Java. So what, let them. If you write MSFortran, that is sort of like Fortran, but not quite, I’m happy for you. The fact that every other Fortran compiler on the planet chokes on MSFortran is only a problem if you don’t know that MSFortran can’t be compiled with any other compiler except a MSFortran compiler. If all you are doing is writing for MS boxes, you might not care. If you are interested in writing standard Fortran then you won’t use a MSFortran compiler. Problem solved. Same with C, .Net, or Perl.
Publish, or have a standards body publish a language spec. If you comply to the spec, you can call your implementation that language, otherwise you can’t. Libraries can be licensed under whatever license you want. The market will decide what’s gets used. Perhaps a BSD or GPL license garners the most developers, perhaps a more proprietary one does. If you get rid of the idea of software patents (they are a stupid idea anyway), a particular library or IDE is copyrighted, but that doesn’t mean that someone else couldn’t reimplement the idea in some other library, write some other IDE. Like .Net, don’t like MS’s license for the .Net framework, recode it LGPL or something, ala Mono. Like Java, but don’t like the direction that Sun is taking it, recode it GPL and call it Tea.
If Sun goes belly up tomorrow, the worse that should happen is that you can’t use Sun’s JWM or libraries. If people are worried about that shouldn’t they be reimplementing their own Sun-Free libraries and JWM?
Let the developers decide. If an API forks, but no one is using the fork, is it really a fork? If the API forks and everyone is using the fork, isn’t that just a revision?
Just think, if Latin was licensed like Java, would there be French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc? What about English, that unholy blend of Latin and Germanic? Talk about a major fork in a language…..
just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
someone247356
So we can say we’re using free software. That may seem foolish, but it’s very very important. Suppose your company decided it wants to move it’s development to free software. But this company also loves doing Java stuff. So, we have a serious issue here: we want free software, but we want Java too.
Now, what’s the problem with making Java free? People say it’ll give us incompatible versions of Java… this is completely BS. It hasn’t happened with other big free projects, it wouldn’t happen to Java.
And to someone that said there are already free implementations of Java, such as GJC, Kaffe… remember that’s *only the VM*. That does not include all the class libraries, which are very important. There is a free class library in development, it’s the Gnu Classpath, but it’s not, *definitely not*, moving as fast as Mono, for example.
Victor.
Java IS GPLed look at CLASSPATH.
What IBM and Co want is to force SUN to GPL their IMPLEMENTATION mainly because of SWING which is a hard work to them to implement. Instead they made a HACK with SWT (which is not-so-bad). What is wrong? Anyone can participate in JCP. Anyone can make their own implementation under any licence they want.
Again, this is not the war for GPL Java. This is the war between IBM and SUN for SWING, coz IBM instead of making their own SWING implementation (better, quicker, super-optimized 😉 made SWT and felt the trump with eclipse (which is a great as a PRODUCT). Now the rest (IDEA, JBuilder, NetBeans) make a strong competence in IDE and support SWT on any (future?) platform is a hard work.
I remember I read a post from SWT team that if it was now (jdk 1.4) they would never even start SWT development…
The SWING is the ONLY part of JAVA that is hard to implement .
Ufffff.
Since we’re talking about that, here’s an article about Brazil’s initiative of helping to develop a free implementation of Java:
“Open-Source Java Brewing in Brazil”
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1665251,00.asp
Victor.
To address a couple of questions:
The main reason there is no GPL push on C, FORTRAN, etc., is that these are already open standards that are not controlled by a single corporation. AT&T does not control C, even though that is where it was invented. If AT&T were to be bought out, or go under, it has zero impact on the future of C.
With Java however, this is not the case. No reasonable person would suggest that Java will go away, even if Sun does. There is too much at stake. Sun will almost certainly be bought out by another company, in which case, that company would gain control of Java.
The concern here is not that whatever company buys Sun would drop Java. The concern is that they would try to turn it into a major profit generating stream by closing off third party access, charging large amounts of money for J2SE (which Sun distributes for free), not allowing third parties to write JREs, etc. ie: Those of us low budget or non-profit, or free software developers working on Java projects could suddenly find that we have to shell out $1,000 for J2SE or some such thing, and that we can no longer distibute our applications unless we buy a license to develop with the Java API.
If Java were GPLd of course, this could not happen.
Personally, I do not think the GPL is the best option for Java because I think it would result in lots of imcompatible JVMs that would break Java’s cross platform ability. But I do wish that Sun would give us some assurance that Java will always remain an open standard for which the core technologies will be freely available. Right now, we have no legal assurance that if Sun were aquired, Java would not end up a closed standard proprietary product where the core technologies had to be licensed by developers. Many small shops, non-profits, and hobby developers simply can’t afford to pay the typical license fees that are required for commercial development tools. Hence, this uncertainty is detrimental to Java’s acceptence among hobbiests, non-profits, etc.
Still can’t see why on earth it should be GPL’d ? So is all of this talk of GPLing Java a total bs ? Is it just to take a pot shot at SUN ? Sun is not going bankrupt anytime soon, so lets leave that out of this argument.
SUN has done quite a good job of making java run everywhere, atleast where I want to run Java, Mac X, Win, Unix, they stopped Microsoft from forking and lets face it, Java is not very buggy, I would bet that way more than 99% of “java related errors” are the programmers fault, like anywhere else.
I just think opensource programmers should start making more Java app’s since they ARE free to have their apps in any license they want, and Sun has said they will never charge for Java, and the Linux, Mac, Win support for Java is great, and works very well. So why on earth re-invent the weel badly in a form of some Microsoft product, just because you call Mono GPL doesnt make it so in the future, and if you only use the Mono parts (none Microsoft parts), your app wont work anywhere else unsless they also install the needed libraries. Java Works.
And for IBM, YOU opensource AIX or show yourself as a hippocrit, IBM is the most closed source company anywhere, just because they bought Eclipse and accidentally went into opensource, they don’t have to many products opensource. Sun on the other hand gave us NFS, Java, OpenOffice and way more, IBM is not even close.
I don’t understand all this talk about GPL’ing Java. I mean, what exactly are you GPL’ing? The JVM? The compiler suite? The API’s?
Good point. a straight GPL of the class libraries would render them completely useless. Of course as someone else pointed out, there is GPL+linking exception which Classpath uses.
Of course Sun probably wouldn’t even use the GPL, but something that they come up with or maybe even another open source license. Most open source licenses tend to be freer than the viral GPL anyway.
“Now, what’s the problem with making Java free? People say it’ll give us incompatible versions of Java… this is completely BS. It hasn’t happened with other big free projects, it wouldn’t happen to Java.”
One word: Linux
Look at all the incompatibilities between Linux distros. It is so bad that most companies developing software for Linux have given up at trying to support anything other than Red Hat. Look at the XFree86 documentation. In the section where it talks about causing XDM to start automatically when it gets to the Linux section, it says “Because difference versions of Linux have different ways of starting XFree86 as a login screen, please see your Linux documentation for details.
So yes, the GPL can and does cause problems with large projects when it comes to standards and compatibility.
“Sun is not going bankrupt anytime soon, so lets leave that out of this argument.”
Sun is not going to go bankrupt. But on the other hand, it is a prime target for aquisition by another company. It is losing money, its stock is devalued, and it has a large customer base and large number of partners that depend on its technology. As pointed out in the article link, one very real possibility of a company that might aquire Sun is Fujitsu, the largest Japanese reseller of Sun products. They hae a huge investment in Sun.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/seanl/stuff/java-objc.html
It would be so funny if another company pulled a Sun with Sun themselves (!), acquired the company, and let the Java platform rot. =D
“What are we going to do now? Dubbya Tee F, wun wun wun!”
I mean, really, everyone would just freak out and try to invent the Next Big Thing and end up with a big freaking mess. That would be so totally cool!
I enjoy programming in Java. It is very elegant and straightforward at least imo. Sun wont go under I think and even if it does Java is too popular to die…it is a great programming paradigm. The 1.5 that has been released is quiet a step forward tho it means relearngin some stuff in a slightly different way…but I am ok with that. By the way I learned Java as my first language to program in… so I could be partial.
I don’t think anything needs to be gpl’d. Instead Sun should bring it before ANSI et al and mak it a real standard like good old C. Once this is done, GPL’d versions will start popping up.
“The 1.5 that has been released is quiet a step forward tho it means relearngin some stuff in a slightly different way.”
Well, everything you used in Java 1.4 still works in Java 1.5. It’s just that now you have a few more tools available to you, which you can choose to use or not. For example, you can use generics, but you don’t have to. You can keep right on programming the way you did in Java 1.4 without generics.
You can also now do frame.add(foo) instead of frame.getContentPane().add(foo). But once again, you don’t have too. frame.add(foo) is simply translated by the compiler to frame.getContentPane().add anyway.
There are ways to run java bytecode in mono, thus solving the case of already compiled software. I would guess that it is only a matter of time before a java for mono compiler is coded, taking care of both source code and future. The only snag would be patents and similar. But somehow there is J#…
GPL or not, the real deal and question is whether a language is standardized and free of legal hazzard. That really should be the only concern needed.
Well, J# is not really Java at all. All it does is support a Java like syntax. But you still need to use the WinFX API. It does not use JFC or anything. It is basically a way for Java programmers to migrate to .NET with slightly fewer things to learn then if they switched to C#. But a normal Java application will not compile under J#.
“There is a free class library in development, it’s the Gnu Classpath, but it’s not, *definitely not*, moving as fast as Mono, for example.”
Kaffe from CVS + JacORB 2.2 have 80% of the 1.4 APIs covered as of today. Last time I checked, 6 weeks ago, we were at 75%. Do your own math wrt how fast its moving.
If you want to help with getting the remaining 20% a little faster (Kerberos, HTML & RTF widgets, PLAF, image codecs, Swing bits and pieces) join us on #classpath on irc.freenode.org.
cheers,
dalibor topic
I think that, this alternative has more future than Java/.Net.
http://ivm.sf.net
Yeah, i know, its beta. But has OpenGL support, and a lot of features. Light, elegant… it really better.
Java has OpenGL as well. In fact, in Java 5, if you turn it on, everything is rendered in OpenGL.
…except that I don’t like C++ or its goddamn syntax.
Oops!
Is that site alive at all? The last news item was over 2 years ago. Looks like the project is dead to me.
Let’s suppose that Sun magically looses the $7B they have in the bank. All their cash! Or see their sales drop to ZERO for 10 quarters straight….as if…anyway…let’s suppose….
Java’s IP is an asset.
When a company is liquidated, its assets are put for sale.
Java would be bought.
By who?
Microsoft, to kill Java ?
IBM, to keep Java alive ?
Kodak, to do god knows what ?
More probably IBM. So Java would not die.
If others buy Java, there would be such bad publicity against such a company killing one of the most widely used technologies that it would backfire on them. Businesses using Java would not decide to port to .NET. instead they would migrate to GNU Java or a similar compatible alternative. So even in the worst case, Java would continue to live. There is a JCP process I heard… C++ had no such open process, and AT&T stopped pushing C++ for years now (Stroustrup does not even work there anymore).
So anyway, the question asked by this article is pure FUD aimed at killing Java in the heard of those with a low IQ.
What if…. What if…. What if…. What if….
Why GPL Java ? What could possible make it better ? I can’t understand that, what would make Java better by open source it ? All classes are kinda open, you can look at the source code if you want, it is just the JVM that you can’t see the source. Hope someone can explain it to me without trolling.
If java had been supported by Sun, there would be no reason to open source it. Then we could have one java made by Sun that we could be fairly sure would run our java programs.
Unfortunately the Sun quality process doesn’t work this way.
Even though java is supposed to be a crossplatform language with good internationalization features. To be satisfied with the Sun handling of java you need to be a windows programmer developing serverside applications for english speaking users. There is no way the open source community or anybody else for that matter could do a worse job than Sun.
As an example, for over four years it have been impossible to use european keyboards in Linux as it makes it impossible to enter certain characters. See http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4799499
Even solaris have frequently had similar problems. If you need crossplatformness go for C#. Sun will not help you.
If java was opensourced it would be another matter.