What Sun Doesn't Want You To Know About Java and Open Source

Yes, its been dog's years since I've blogged...but I just couldn't be silent about this.

Today at JavaONE my pal Geir Magnusson is announcing that Harmony has full support for SWING/AWT. This is really big news if you're following Harmony from the sidelines (as Sun has been doing).

You see, Sun's compatibility rules for for the Java language have long included a "gotcha" in the form of a chunk of code for user interface, for which there are no compatibility tests (SWING/AWT). Original Java Licensees were told they just had to "use Sun's code" or they weren't 'compatible'. Apple's MacOSX integration of Java into their Aqua interface was a notable exception (about which Sun was none too pleased back in the day, but decided it was too small a market to really fuss over). IBM tested these waters as well with Eclipse, an IDE which initially didn't support SWING but later was forced to add SWING support because developers wanted it. But Eclipse wasn't an implementation of the Java language.

Earlier this week we all heard about Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green hinting they were about ready to release Java under some OSI-approved license. Supposedly they just need to nail down "How to Deal with Compatibility". I read this news with some irony, since I know that they bloody well know exactly what to do already. Its been discussed every year since 1999 inside of Sun. Their covenant with Apache and the Geronimo has already successfully demonstrated that it can be done (compatible FOSS reimplementations of Sun-generated specifications). They are simply being disingenuous. What they really mean is "How can we placate the FOSS community without giving up control?" which is the age-old question for Sun.

For a long time Sun believed that Free Java efforts such as Kaffe/GNU Classpath were not a real threat because they were poorly organized to actually implement the entire set of class libraries (which admittedly is a huge task). But even if the class libraries were implemented in toto, there was always the fact that they couldn't possibly do SWING. Fans of Free Java inside of Sun have been arguing for years that Sun should free SWING to enable the Kaffe/GNU Classpath effort as a hedge against something more organized (and therefor more troubling) such as Harmony.

So...I'm wondering how long it will take the various Linux distros to figure out that they can ship Harmony (as they ship Apache) pre-installed and ready to use (even while they continue to put Sun's JRE in the "non-free" directory, where its still two clicks away from users).

Free Java marches on...

Comments

[Mark Wielaard]

[...] For a long time Sun believed that Free Java efforts such as Kaffe/GNU Classpath were not a real threat because they were poorly organized to actually implement the entire set of class libraries (which admittedly is a huge task). But even if the class libraries were implemented in toto, there was always the fact that they couldn't possibly do SWING. [...]

That made me smile!
Seen our latest release? :)

http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/announce/20060515.html - GNU Classpath 0.91 - One for All, All for One.
http://jroller.com/page/dgilbert?entry=1_45_million_lines_of - 1.45 million lines of code.
http://www.kaffe.org/~stuart/japi/htmlout/h-jdk14-classpath.html - 98.96% coverage of the 1.4 API (1.5 maturing rapidly)

And the included Free Swing looks reall nice!
http://jroller.com/page/dgilbert?entry=gnu_classpath_0_91

O, and it is already included in most major GNU/Linux distributions...

[C. Scott Marshall]

I'm curious as to why you (or I guess, Sun) regard us Classpath hackers as "poorly organized," and yet Harmony is somehow more organized.

Is it because they have people who talk (er, write email) all the time instead of writing code? Or because they managed to panhandle code from IBM and Intel? The whole it-ain't-valid-unless-there's-a-company-behind-it-and-oh-yeah-RedHat-doesn't-count argument holds no water. And Harmony could have had a 98%-complete class library by cooperating with us, but they didn't.

True, free software development tends to be pretty anarchistic, but I'd argue that Harmony is just as anarchistic, and that their apparent development plan -- hope that someone donates code please -- is inferior to Classpath's, which I regard as "try to be as compatible as you can with Sun everywhere, and try to surpass their implementation wherever you can." Yeah, we may suffer from too few developers, but we have enough people to make progress, even if it is slow.

I mean, we're doing something honest and good, and it's already a remarkable achievement. I don't want that trivialized.

(And I don't mean to dump all over your blog in particular. I'm really just saying "huh? poorly organized? wha?")

[John Catherino]

Scott,

I did not read it that way at all.

Danese wrote:

[...] they were poorly organized to actually implement the entire set of class libraries [...]

Note no use of the word the word too, before the word poorly.

My take was that Sun's JRE development team must be both very large, and highly organised. She believes Sun assumed this difference made GNU Classpath unlikely to succeed.

I actually thought it rather complimentary; she asserts that Sun's assumption turned out to be false.

[David Fu]

I think Danese is on the side of Free Runtimes, so she is just telling us what is being thought about at the highest level of management at Sun when she was still there. GNU Classpath and Kaffe may have been slow, but by being slow and steady, the race can still be won. Look at Debian, there is a community there which understands that they do not need to keep up with buzzwords and hype to produce a stable platform used by a large number of people. Maybe we, supporters of Free Runtimes, need to rethink what we really want to achieve, and regroup our efforts towards that goal. I hope Danese will give us some suggestions/strategy to help us build a strong Free Runtimes Community.

[void_free]

Hell this was interesting! Also good to know that Kaffee is much far ahead than I had expected. I tried compiling some java apps with kaffee and they rocked. :)
Remeber the good ol' days when kaffee was shipped with RH. What it 5.0?

[Tim Boudreau]

With apologies for being slightly off topic, but relating to Sun and open source, while Intel seems to be in the business of liberating stuff, has any thought been given to opening this (possibly too old to be worth it?):

http://archives.java.sun.com/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9707&L=jmf-interest&D=0&P=5340

see also

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-215853.html

[Tim O'Brien]

Right on, had the same reaction. Especially unpolished key note reaction "We're going to open source Java", *smirk*, that's not the issue. Go Harmony.

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[pavithran]

madame ... Suns JRE is not just 2 clicks away for linux users!
A Bachelor of engineering in Computers gal had to beg for my assistance to install java in her fedora core 4!

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