The software and server company published very early versions of the source code of the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 6.0 on its Web site so Java programmers could better see and participate in its development, said Graham Hamilton, a Sun vice-president. Java 6 is due in the first half of 2006, Hamilton said.
Sun has published source code for its ‘Mustang’ Project
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Eugenia Loli
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Better look a little closer at that restrictive license.
Pehaps SUN is starting with a restrictive licence to see how open they can be on the future? Or maybe they’re just afraid of loosing control over the java specification, and brand?
Java is a key technology to SUN… I think its wiser for them to play safe…
Let’s hope that in the future we can see a full OpenSource(TM) Java(TM). For now… well, even if Java isn’t GPL, it is closer than .NET will ever be (and yes I’m aware of Mono). And there’s lots of open-source java based projects…
What I mean is… I think is worth to support Java, and I realy think that there is hope for a full opensource release in the future.
(sorry my broken english, I’m no native speaker!)
“Java is a key technology to SUN… I think its wiser for them to play safe… ”
why cant create a ISO or ECMA spec then
If Java were to be assigned an open source license GPL would be the last license Sun would want to use. It is not in anyone’s interest to have Java be GPL. An Apache-style license makes more sense. GPL makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
GPL does make sense but only to OSS. A better option might be LGPL
“Sun spends billions developing a HUGE system–a new language, new compilers, new virtual machines, as well as a huge class library–a language that takes the world by storm, which it provides for free, and now it allows access to the internals, including weekly snapshots, source code, etc–and you fucking complain that the license might be “too restrictive”?
”
ya. sun did the same thing with openoffice remember?. the license is restrictive. there is no doubt about that. if we cant complain about stuff we get for free why do we complain about the environment when the air is free
Well, of course the class libraries will never be GPL. That would render Java useless. Of course the compiler and other tools might be GPL’d. Sun will probably come up with their own license for everything though, if or when they open source it.
You mean except for these people: http://classpath.org ? (Okay, so the license has an exception to allow you to create non-GPL applications with it.)
Because standards comittees aren’t know for being the fastest moving things around. Take a look at how long it took C++ compilers to conform to the ISO C++ spec, or how long it was before the major compilers supported the C99 spec.
There are actually two points in my post :-|. The first being that standards committees are slow. The second is that compiler makers are slow to support standards too.
“Because standards comittees aren’t know for being the fastest moving things around. Take a look at how long it took C++ compilers to conform to the ISO C++ spec, or how long it was before the major compilers supported the C99 spec.”
First you say that the comittees are slow, than you say say that compilers did not move at the pace of the standards??
In these cases the standards were moving faster than
the compiler implementations. If a compiler vendor is specifying the language (as Microsoft did with C#), the compiler will obviously conform to the spec from the start.
is there any overview of what new features or changes they are planning on making? I know there won’t be drastic changes like 1.5 but I’m assuming it’ll be more than jsut HotSpot improvments and deprecating a few classes and methods.
“The first being that standards committees are slow. The second is that compiler makers are slow to support standards too.”
MS did that. why cant SUN?
“Java is a key technology to SUN… I think its wiser for them to play safe… ”
why cant create a ISO or ECMA spec then
Why is that required? the Java specification is fully open for all and sundry to impliment, and if you want to add some of the features that are waiting to be accepted, that is, the ones still in the JCP process, you can do that too.
The only catch is, you can’t call it Java; you can call it Mocha Latté, Tea Pot or C-Flat if you so wish, just don’t call it Java.
The specification is fully open, and the reference implementation is SUN’s own implementation, and unlike Microsoft, EVERYTHING is openly documentated.
Why didn’t Microsoft submit the WHOLE .NET framework to the ECMA? why not winforms? ASP.NET? ADO.NET and so forth? it Microsoft is really comitted to openstandards, the whole thing would have been openly given to ECMA, and there would have been a complete reference made available for a number of platforms.
The fact is, less than 1/2 the .NET Framework has been implemented on Rotor, and thats not even considered a piece of software worthy of being used in a commercial environment according to Microsoft.
The day Microsoft fully openstandard its whole .NET Framework, makes a full reference available for more than just the Windows platform – for example, Solaris and Linux, .NET will continue to be a technology of only any relevance to those who are stuck to the Windows platform because the PHB upstairs can’t live without his Luna desktop theme and pinball game.
“if we cant complain about stuff we get for free why do we complain about the environment when the air is free”
the air gets dirty
sun is moving to a more open process in JCP. I believe they are planning to do what is similiar to OpenVMS. Allow contributions from 3rd parties while keeping the system to themselves. Well, thats just what i told them to do as a start
“if we cant complain about stuff we get for free why do we complain about the environment when the air is free”
what an analogy?
nobody really owns the air, so it’s not free because somebody gives it to you .. it’s free by its nature.
by contrast, Sun owns Java, and they give it to the community for free (while they don’t have to) — and that’s different.
🙂