Horizon appearing for freed open source Java
by Karsten Wade
Weren’t we all skeptical when Sun announced their intent to open source Java? But we’ve watched along the way, as they chose a good free/libre/open source software license (the GPL), as they opened the code Sun has a copyright to, and as they have embraced (to varying degrees) the community efforts, such as GNU Classpath and IcedTea.
It should be apparent that Red Hat is looking to put its bread where the open source butter is spread, in the acquisition of middleware powerhouse JBoss. As can happen with an acquisition, that propelled Red Hat even further into the Java camp. Yet is has been several of the long-time Red Hat engineers who are also responsible for leading and coding on open source projects that enabled all this to happen (GNU Classpath, IcedTea, gcj, and all around Eclipse, to name a prominent few.) What may have started as hedging the bet that Sun would follow through, all of this work has resulted in a stronger relationship across Java camps.
In a fair article on the freeing of Java, “Java fully open-sourced ‘by end of year’“, ZDNet quotes Sun that this year is going to see the end of all the remaining unfreeable parts of the JRE. What you think about that has to be balanced with what you believe. And this time, I find I’m believing that Sun can and will do it in 2008.
See you next week at JavaOne and CommunityOne. I’ll be there, on Monday talking about Fedora (and OpenJDK), and the rest of the week in the pavilion at the JBoss booth.