[NTLUG:Discuss] What's the deal with Java?

[Stephen Davidson]

Hi Guys.

Making my living developing software in Java (a reasonably lucrative
idea that has kept me over-employed for the last 5 years), I can answer
some of your questions;
1) Runtime distribution - You can redistribute the unaltered Sun JRE for
free, although Sun would prefer that you arrange for the latest to be
downloaded from their website.
2) For a fee, you can develop your own JVM, and so long as it passes the
Java Compatibility Toolkit (which is also not cheap - about $10K last
time I looked), you may call it Java.  IBM and BEA are two companies
that do this.  HP puts out one for their mainframes as well, and I do
not believe that they charge additional for it.  Oh yeah, and there has
been a micro-JVM shipped on every cellphone manufactured since 2003.
3) JDK (Java Development Toolkit) - the basic one from Sun is free to
download and use.  Only restriction is you have to register with their
site (no charge).  Initially, the source for the Java Objects was a
separate download, but its been included since 1.4 (pre-release was
2003).  The source code for the JVM itself is a little more restricted. 
Officially, you had to work for a Sun Partner to get it, but they
loosened up a bit for 1.4, and you could download (no charge) and look. 
But you could only redistribute under the conditions of 1 & 2.  Now a
days, you can download under the SCSL, but you can not normally
redistribute, and for using it to distribute Java, see point number 2 above.
4) Java IDE - Eclipse & Netbeans are the current leading freebies,
released by IBM & Sun respectively.  Both are OpenSource, and both have
a huge following.  Borland's is one of the better "charge" tools.

Now, as to what is going on between OpenSource and Java.
Issue 1: There is history between Gosling & Stallman that is not good
(see Emacs Wars)
Issue 2: There is a fee to develop and release your own version of
Java.  I don't need to explain the issues that the Open Source community
would have with this.

Sun biggest issue in releasing Java to OpenSource?  Microsoft.  Issues
were laid out in the great Microsoft-Java lawsuit.  Microsoft,
supposedly under the terms of "2" above, developed their own JVM and
released it.  Then they made it, and the object code generated by their
Java compilers, incompatible with Java.  This caused one version of Java
for the Desktops, and another for everything else, and the two were not
compatible.  Sun, not wanting another Unix type split, promptly sued. 
Won a rather large settlement over it.  It came out during the battle
that MS was trying to kill Java.  Btw, then and today, the MS Java is
the only unstable version, with unlimited level security holes.

If the community wants Java to be completely open source, the above
issue is one of the major issues that would have to be settled.  In the
meantime, Sun developed a mechanism, the Java Community Process, whereby
the user community can specify what needs to go into Java, and how it is
supposed to behave.  While maybe not the best mechanism, in general it
does work, and Sun currently is the only company I am aware of to get
this much feedback and customer assistance in developing ANY of the
products. Last time I looked, there were over 200 Working Groups,
developing various Java Technologies.  Unlike many open source projects,
Java is in places were reliability and stability are a must.  In the
last 12 months, I have worked one project where a failure would cost the
entity involved about $1Million/minute, and another project where a
failure would cost much more than that.  And these apps are by no means
unique.  You can't be messing around with that kind of money at stake. 
So the customers in this case need a guarantee of platform stability. 
Which brings us to Issue 3 - why Sun won't release Java as Open Source. 
The Open Source community would need to come up with a better process
than the JCP for Sun to be able to safely consider releasing Java.  And
come up with some way for keeping the language from getting corrupted by
malicious enitities, corporate or otherwise.

Regards,
Steve


Ralph Green, Jr. wrote:
>Howdy,
>  As Lance said, many people object to the
>licensing on Java.  Think of it this way.
>OpenOffice 2 has dependencies on a package
>that is free to distribute, but controlled
>by one company.  If people want to make
>modifications to OpenOffice, they have to
>deal with a major component that they cannot
>get the source to and which they cannot modify.
>That is not good, if it is important to you
>that your application be really open source.
>So, people are looking at substituting other
>Java components that have more open licenses.
> 
>  To most Open Source advocates, free as in
>speech is much more important than free as in
>beer.  It is nice that Sun gives away Java
>runtimes and I even understand why they have
>not open sourced Java, I think.  That lack of
>an open source license on Java, though has
>ramifications.  And the most significant is
>that it discourages people from building on
>top of it.
>
> If you want to see an example of how this
>kind of thing has played out in the past, I
>suggest you look at QT.  QT is a set of
>graphics libraries that KDE is built upon.
>There were so many people concerned about
>the non-free nature of the QT libraries at
>one time that Gnome was born and developed
>into a serious contender.  A lot of people
>are really serious about this stuff.  We
>don't want someone to be able to get a
>hammerlock on the systems and the only way
>to do that is to be sure that we only support
>open source packages for the important stuff.
>Good day,
>Ralph
>
>On Sun, 2005-06-26 at 21:33 -0500, Leroy Tennison wrote:
>  
>>Concerning OpenOffice.org v2 I saw the comment that Java wasn't free and 
>>it's causing a stir.  I can download a Java runtime free, right?  I 
>>...do I?  So what's the big deal?
>>    
>
>
>
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