Upon arriving I was immediately struck by how large and professional this open community conference is. CommunityOne seems indicative of what Sun’s developer audience might expect. A nice balance of spoon fed and gourmet buffet. Aside from doing final polish on my Fedora community presentation, I went to Benjamin Mako Hill’s talk on free culture and freedomdefined.org.
Currently I’m sitting in Jono Bacon’s talk on Ubuntu, and it’s amazing the thematic matches. People who really get community, the value of working with upstream, and treating community in the right ways. I think that, aside from logos, I could take Jono’s talk and give it about Fedora. Well, all except the Chuck Norris images.
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.
This article is an explanation for why non-commercial use restrictions on free content are contrary to the goal of making it free in the first place. It brings the discussion more clearly into a realm that is understandable for creative people not familiar with what we’ve learned in the free software movements. Think of it like great science writing, able to explain a complicated concept to a layperson … yet still with lessons for the most experienced.
http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
