More Sun news: Sun promises to open-source Java

[Pete Ryland]

On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 09:23:53PM +1000, Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:
> On Sunday 21 May 2006 21:02, Pete Ryland wrote:
> > The whole world can now improve on it and maybe even make it work, and port
> > it to other platforms; they may actually acheive their goal of write once,
> > run anywhere!
> I don't think that they really want people to be writing source cod for them, 
> and I don't honestly think that people will.

People will.  There is so much that java could do better, and so many bugs
in the ports of Java.

Consider Java for Linux.  We have the Sun version and the Blackdown port
(created with the Sun code under NDA), which people do run, but no-one
really wants to because they're not free and are based on older versions and
are quite buggy with fixes not coming so quickly; then we have a whole host
of clean-room ports of the various parts of the system that no-one uses
because they're incomplete.

If Sun were to free the code, then all these efforts can be put together to
produce a more complete and more efficient implementation.  This may still
take years, somewhat similarly to Firefox, but it at least will be possible.

There are so many platforms then that would benefit from a port of Java that
would then be possible, from custom embedded devices, to other Unices, to
older OSes and hardware.  These would receive as much care and attention as
their users will give, rather than what Sun can provide.

> For example, nobody really the uses the rpm code, even though redhat has
> open sourced it. They use the application, but the code doesn't seem to
> get used (please correct me if I'm wrong). Another well known one is yast
> in suse, again nobody really uses that code. A third example is the HP
> printer drivers.

There are various ways in which the code gets used.  For example, for
auditing and bug fixing, especially when a bug occurs only under certain
circumstances.  It took me just a few seconds with Google to find the
rpm-devel mailing list to which patches are being sent all the time it
seems.

Pete
-- 
       "If you could do Java over again, what would you change?"
     "I'd leave out classes" - James Gosling, at a Java User Group