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Article: Java being non-open source (Read 832 times)

mflux

Article: Java being non-open source
Apr 1^st, 2006, 3:35am

Yep. We all know this. But here's an interesting article about the missed opporunities made by Sun for their current situation. An interesting read for those geeky enough I suppose.

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=190

Quote:

I want to talk about the opportunity costs of them not open sourcing Java. Those things that are clearly measurable as things that were missed because Java wasn’t open source. Here’s the stuff that I know of off the top of my head:

Eclipse. Wait, what you say? Isn’t eclipse written in Java? Isn’t that a success for Java? Kind of. In some ways Eclipse is even more important than Java. It’s a great framework and a great development environment. It makes using Java productive. From what I hear from friends who develop in Eclipse and Visual C++ from Microsoft, Eclipse kicks the crap out of it. We could be kicking ass with it. But it’s based on non-free software. Which means it’s tainted and the right people won’t get behind it. The license holds Eclipse back.

Mozilla. I’m sure that if we had an open source Java that ran on as many platforms as Gecko does that you would be able to write extensions in Java. But you can’t right now. Instead you’re using JavaScript and Top Men are hacking on JavaScript 2. Once again, a missed opportunity.

etc.

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fry

Re: Article: Java being non-open source
Reply #1 - Apr 1^st, 2006, 7:56pm

i've read other stuff by this guy and think he's sharp but this seems like a weird article to me.. comparisons to .net, which is not itself open source? sure mono is, but that's the analogous situation to gcj/kaffe.. and isn't that more a complaint of gcj/kaffe not being further along? java replacing php/perl? java is a bad language for things that i do with php and perl, i don't think open source would or should change that.. i don't think java is what's holding back eclipse, or if it is, then open source developers need to grow up and pick their battles better. i think the most compelling reason from my standpoint is the issue of integration with mozilla/firefox and being able to distribute a proper runtime along with linux, but these are much more to the technical side of things, and linux users are a tiny portion of the market, any way you slice it.

i would far prefer that java were open source, but i don't think the "open source" issue is anywhere near the top as far as what has slowed adoption. for me it would be #1 the suit with microsoft (msft successfully polluting the air and sun being idiots) and all its fallout (no jvm shipped with windows anymore and perpetual 1.1 hell on win2k/most of xp), and #2 sun's insistence on aggressively bloating the api spec and making it nearly impossible to build a proper vm for other platforms within any reasonable amount of time (what's held back 1.5 on the mac and kaffe/gcj on linux from catching up).

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