Sun Makes Java Code Open Source
As someone who has worked twice for companies that made "clean-room" Java VM implementations, including the first one for the Mac, Roaster, I can tell you this is pretty significant.
The amount of work to make your own compatible VM and emulate Sun's VM is large, to the point where you are even emulating their bugs (to be 100% compatible). Now, the Sun Java source code is free to look at, whereas before, to be clean-room you had to have been able to say you've NEVER looked at any of it. I'm sure this means that embedded device makers will no longer have to license the VM from Sun unless they want their support. Before, you had to go the 3rd party clean-room route to avoid paying what could turn out to be exorbitant royalty fees to Sun. This is a HUGE change.
The move represents one of the largest additions of computer code to the open-source community -- and it marks a major shift for a company that had once fiercely protected the source code used in 3.8 billion cell phones, supercomputers, medical devices, and other gadgets.
The amount of work to make your own compatible VM and emulate Sun's VM is large, to the point where you are even emulating their bugs (to be 100% compatible). Now, the Sun Java source code is free to look at, whereas before, to be clean-room you had to have been able to say you've NEVER looked at any of it. I'm sure this means that embedded device makers will no longer have to license the VM from Sun unless they want their support. Before, you had to go the 3rd party clean-room route to avoid paying what could turn out to be exorbitant royalty fees to Sun. This is a HUGE change.
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posted by Michael on Monday, November 13, 2006
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1 Comments:
Well actually you still can't look at it. I work on cleanroom implementations (IBM's J9) and by looking and possibly incorporating Sun GPL code would not be great for our commercial product. Further, most of my work has been contributed to Apache Harmony. Same goes there, anyone browsing Sun GPL code and incorporating it in Harmony would be counter to the Apache license. I think it's an interesting move but for business reasons find the license restrictive.
/Ken Walker
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