Java and Open Source [LWN.net]

[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

The JavaOne conference was held last week in San Francisco, and as usual there was a barrage of announcements from Sun about new Java-related initiatives and technologies, some of them actually of interest to the Linux and Open Source communities.

One of the big announcements was the launch of Java.net, a cooperative effort with O'Reilly and CollabNet. Java.net seems to be Sun's answer to SourceForge, an Open Source development site but with a specialization in Java and Java-related technologies. The site will include hosting of projects, mailing lists, forums, wikis and blogs (presumably about Java or related technologies). Right now Java.net only boasts a few projects: JXTA, NetBeans, the Javapedia, JAIN and so on.

The NetBeans team announced the NetBeans 3.5 release, including the NetBeans IDE, last week as well. The NetBeans IDE is written, not surprisingly, in Java, so you should be able to run it on Linux or any other platform with decent Java support. However, the NetBeans IDE is not limited to Java development -- it supports C, C++, XML and HTML as well as Java. NetBeans has been available under an Open Source license, the Sun Public License, for three years now.

Sun also announced the Sun ONE Studio 5 IDE, which is based on the NetBeans Platform. This one isn't Open Source, but it does run on Linux and may be of interest to J2SE (Java 2 Standard Edition) and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) developers.

Another interesting tidbit announced during the JavaOne timeframe is the Scripting Java Specification Request (JSR), a plan to help scripting languages like PHP and Java interact. Specifically, it's aimed at writing Java classes that can be invoked by a page using PHP, ECMAScript or other scripting languages that are in wide usage. The Scripting JSR seems to be in a formative stage at the moment, but it should be interesting to see what the group comes up with in the long term. The initial members of the group are Sun, Macromedia, Zend and Oracle.

Open Source gamers might be pleased to learn that Sun has diverted work on some gaming APIs from the Java Community Process to Java.net as well. However, this probably has more to do with the fact that Sun doesn't see much profitability in gaming APIs for Java than any major commitment to the Open Source philosophy.

Sun also touted a "simplified" Java Research License (JRL). The JRL is supposed to "simplify and relax" the research section of Sun's Sun Community Source License (SCSL). This allows some limited development for research and development, but anyone hoping to distribute a project will have to go to Sun for a commercial agreement and meet Java compatibility requirements. In other words, it still is not a free license.

What are the prospects of Sun making Java itself Open Source? It's probably not going to happen anytime soon, but there are folks at Sun who'd are in favor of making Java, or parts of it, Open Source. James Gosling, the guy responsible for Java, is in favor of releasing Java according to this Computerworld article:

Oh, yeah. I've always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business.

Slowly but surely, Sun seems to be moving towards a more open stance with Java, but the company is still retaining very tight control on the core Java technologies.

to post comments

Surely?

Posted Jun 19, 2003 1:31 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (5 responses)

Joe wrote, "Slowly but surely, Sun seems to be moving towards a more open stance...". I would say slowly and haltingly. There's nothing sure about where they will end up. If they really are the "other party" funding SCO's attack on Linux, for instance, that would say a lot about their real goals.

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 2:33 UTC (Thu) by judge (guest, #6234) [Link] (4 responses)

No matter how nice sun is, their jdk still isn't as portable or openly available as any real opensource software...Just trying distributing an opensource java app and see how many users don't have a jre installed.
This makes making your software apt-gettable very very hard.

Or maybe try getting a sun jre to work on freebsd? Or OpenBSD? Good luck.

On the other hand you can use older java apis with true opensource tools such as gcj and kaffe(which is a bit on the buggy side)

With gcj you can compile java apps to native linux/windows/*bsd apps that only depend on opensource libs, so now any user can download and use your app without going through the convoluted process of finding a jre.

I'm doing just this with http://irate.sf.net ...Trying to port it away from sun's/ibm-jre-only stuff like swing/xerces to code that will compile and run with gcj & SWT.

I firmly believe think gcj is a very pleasant way to develop native application with an easy language like java. No Sun needed :)

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 8:22 UTC (Thu) by tarvin (guest, #4412) [Link]

"judge" said:

"Just trying distributing an opensource java app and see how many
users don't have a jre installed.
This makes making your software apt-gettable very very hard."

I agree. The Java mantra should actually be "write once, run nowhere". Sure, all LWN readers have no problem finding and installing a JRE/JDK. But on most "end-user" systems, you don't see any modern JRE.

And that's not only Microsoft's fault.

Sun: It's about time to make JDK open source.

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 9:12 UTC (Thu) by ohanssen (subscriber, #2761) [Link] (2 responses)

It is actually apt-gettable. By including the Blackdown server in the
sources list you can get the latest JDK as Debian packages. But I really
wish that the Java 2 platform could be available in the "official" Debian
distribution. It was at the time of JDK 1.1, so why not now? Because of
the licensing?

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 12:54 UTC (Thu) by kreutzm (guest, #4700) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, I'd like to apt-get it. But unfortunately, I am not on i386, so I am out of luck. And even attempts to port the JDK to alpha have been brought to a grindingly halt by Sun's license.

I'd really like to programm a little in Java, but as long as I have to gamble if JRE is available on the target system, I don't.

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 14:27 UTC (Thu) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

Seconded - the situation is much the same on ARM. I have some java apps I'd like to run and I can do it with a bit of faff on x86 but on other platforms things almost invariably don't work because they only actually work with sun's JRE and the alternatives aren't quite enough the same, the wrong API version, buggy, non-free or both.

As a result I simply ignore java as much as I possibly can and will continue to do so until I can apt-get an up-to-date JRE from Debian on all arches. Even the blackdown one is no use to me as it won't run on the really old ARM hardware I actually need java on (all last time I looked, but having been burned a couple of times on this - once costing real money and a contract, I'm not keen to return to the flames).