Sun yanks FreeBSD's Java license [LWN.net]

Sun yanks FreeBSD's Java license

Posted Jan 10, 2005 22:36 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to: Sun yanks FreeBSD's Java license by mrshiny
Parent article: Sun yanks FreeBSD's Java license

You mean like the way Python and Perl run all their files by compiling the source to bytecode at runtime, and then running the bytecode? (Python will even save a snapshot of the bytecode for libraries, if the directory is writeable.) Bytecode dates back to (at least) Pascal p-code in the 1970's, which had the disadvantage of being Pascal and running on 1970's hardware where assembly was still a good idea.

Lots of stuff uses bytecode today. The only "advantage" java has over a modern interpreted language like Python is the ability to distribute closed-source binaries (and a few years head start on optimizing the runtime. Woo. I did animated graphics in java on a 486 and figured out how to get decent performance in 1998. Work just loaned me a brand new 1.6 ghz Pentium M).

Java _is_ dead in the open source world. See Johnathan Schwarz's blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20041021

> Now, I had a parallel set of interactions at this year's JavaOne, at
> which a bunch of friends joined us for a discussion on the open sourcing
> of Java. Among the luminaries present was Brian Behlendorf, who opened
> his statements by asking what I'm sure he felt was a question with a
> popular answer, "How many of you work on an open source project?"
>
> I expected to see a flurry of hands, and I'm sure he did, too.
>
> Neither of us saw hands go up.
>
> The community represented at JavaOne either worked within the Java
> Community, or were developers with other issues on their minds (like
> their day jobs). Interesting.

As usual, Schwartz missed the point completely. Open source coders don't use java anymore, thus they aren't at JavaOne. We abandoned it years ago after Sun refused to hand the langauge over to a standards body, after "no Linux JDK" was the #1 bug on java.sun.com with five times as many votes as any other bug and Sun completely ignored it for over a year, after the Sun guys abused the Blackdown developers to the point where most of them quit, after the "Sun Community License" where looking at the source taints you in perpetuity showed they just didn't get it...

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Sun yanks FreeBSD's Java license

Posted Jan 11, 2005 1:32 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I had. A lot of trouble. With resolver, with threads, etc, etc. To the level when we discussed switch to Windows (where problems are not so acute) or rewriting everything in C/C++ (where we at least can properly debug problems).

Sun yanks FreeBSD's Java license

Posted Jan 11, 2005 20:55 UTC (Tue) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

If you only run Free software then Java is a reall pain.

It's not just that the Free java tools suck, it's that they suck in different incompatible ways. Code that works under gcj doesn't work with jikes and vice-versa.

At least if you use Mono under Linux and you distribute your code to someone else who uses Mono under Linux then you have a chance the the code will run on both systems.

For massive dedicated installations you just install Sun's non-Free JAVA, do your work, get paid and try to find something fullfilling to do in your free time. That's OK. But I still see java used for stuff like ICQ clients and source code analysis tools and people expect them to work under Debian. That's just not happenning.

Yeah -- no problems at all. On i386.

Posted Jan 12, 2005 8:23 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Things get worse very very fast if you dare to use amd64, or powerpc, or ...

Freedom doesn't mean freedom to run on vendor-approved hardware only -- it means freedom to run the code ANYWHERE, even if it's an old m68k Amiga.

Sun yanks FreeBSD's Java license

Posted Jan 11, 2005 4:57 UTC (Tue) by cajal (guest, #4167) [Link]

The only "advantage" java has over a modern interpreted language like Python is the ability to distribute closed-source binaries.

That, and Java's VM is lightyears more advanced that CPython's. Python has a global interpreter lock, so it's hard to scale it up, thread-wise. It's unable to defragment its heap and release unused memory back to the OS. It doesn't have generational or parallel garbage collection. It doesn't natively have a JIT, nor does it profile code as it runs for further optimization. It's not possible to write lock-free algorithms in Python

Python is one of my favorite languages, but for enterprise work, it just doesn't hold a candle to Sun's HotSpot JVM or IBM's JVM.