Sun to Change Java License for Linux 226
daria42 writes "It looks like the days of downloading Java every time you re-install a Linux box may be at an end. Reports are trickling in that Sun plans to alter the Java license to make it easier to bundle the JRE with Linux. From the article: 'Sun has faced calls several times to open-source Java, which advocates say would foster innovative open-source development. The company has resisted formally open-sourcing all of the Java software, but it has dramatically changed the development process around Java and changed licenses to make it easier to see Java source code.'"
slackware has jre in 10.2? (Score:3, Interesting)
jre-1_5 [slackware.it]
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun's commitement? (Score:5, Interesting)
Given this
If anything, this slows Java adoption.
Java was all the rage in the late 90s. Had they made it Free, I think it would have been a tour de force. Now we see competition from simpler technologies. We're learning that we don't need a J2EE infrastructure when a simple Model-View-Controller model with a database backend will do the job just as well, and so on.
Freeing Java would spread adoption, if nothing else than by including it in every distribution shortly thereafter.
This new license system isn't good enough, it'll just frustrate people.
Java as electricity (Score:5, Interesting)
Forbes:
You're trying to woo customers with free hardware. How do you make them paying customers? You haven't monetized Java proportional to what's out there.
JShwartz:
That's a misnomer. Largely an American misnomer. Nearing 1 billion Java handsets.
Forbes:
So what's your Java revenue?
JS:
Close to $13 billion.
F:
That's not money in Sun's pocket, though.
JS:
It's like asking a company that produces generators how much of their demand comes from people using electricity. It's 100 percent.
F:
But it's about how many customers are paying you for the privilege of using Java.
S:
And I'll point out that a billion handsets fuels an enormous market in the telecommunications industry. Java running on Sun's Java Enterprise system, whether it's at American Express or General Electric or Vodafone, is fueling Sun's overall revenue. Asking us how much money we make on Java is like asking Verizon Communications how much money they make on handsets. The fact is that they lose a fortune on handsets, but they make a fortune in subscribers.
F:
So are you going to convert Java users to subscription service for Sun?
S:
Partially, we're already doing that. American Express runs on the Java Enterprise system. That's per employee subscription for core middleware for Sun. My broader point is that Java ensures Sun has access to an open market. Java allows us to reach out to customers who don't run on Sun hardware and ensure we can serve them wherever they may be--whether it's on a Dell box or HP box or in an IBM customer base.
Again, it's hard to explain to people. Here's an analogy. With the advent of electricity, Thomas Edison tried to patent a lightbulb so that you would have to use his lightbulbs if you used his dynamo. That strategy obviously failed. And what emerged was the standard plug. Asking Sun the value of Java is like asking GE--which is, I think, the largest manufacturer of power turbines in the world--what the value of the standard plug is. It ensures they can serve a global marketplace. So if you asked them what's the value of the plug, how would they respond?
Here are some stats on Java: There are more than 1 billion Java cards in the marketplace, securing everything from set-top boxes to handsets. There are more than a billion Java handsets, all driving demand for network infrastructure. There are nearly 1,000 members of the Java community process, who collectively contribute to the standard called "Java." It is the default standard for set-top boxes in Brazil. So what will the infrastructure opportunity be in Brazil to serve 100 million Java-enabled set-top boxes? I promise you it will be enormous, and Sun will be among many participants that can serve that demand.
Re:Hard.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish Java was more like CPAN (Score:5, Interesting)
The more I hear calls that Java to be more open source the more I wish all these Java libraries worked like the way CPAN does.
CPAN is great and its what keeps Perl relevant and it works well for the Perl community. All these java libraries bundled with the JDK should be more modular with a lean core distro and then the rest can be organized and installed as modules.
And like everything CPAN all these modules will be peer reviewed by other Java developers in the open source and corporate worlds.
Ah, one can only dream.
Re:Java as electricity (Score:3, Interesting)
The interviewer, however, has a point that Schwartz did not address: It is equally clear that Sun could benefit more from Java.
Schwartz brings up mobile Java. Sun won by default: Qualcomm keeps their application environment on their chips, and Microsoft keeps their's on their OS. Schwartz has no answer to how this victory is monetized. There are some obvious missed opportunities in mobile commerce servers, for example.
If Sun really wants Java to be like electricity and Sun to make generators, the open-sourcing of Java is critical: It has to be a top-tier choice when considering managed lanaguages for all kinds of Linux software, including desktop software. That means it has to be in the top Linux distributions - VM, libraries, everything.
Sun has done a great job of turning NetBeans into an open sourceIDE that is very approachable for beginners. Matisse brings NetBeans up to Visual Studio standards and beyond for making GUI layout easy. Debugging, profiling, and round-trip UML are easy and free in NetBeans. If they can convince Red Hat and Ubuntu to bundle Java and Netbeans, it will be the path of least resistance for new coders making application on Linux.
After that, Sun still has the task ahead of it of getting the most out of Java in a market that rejects lock-in. There will be no replay of the dot-bombs that raised millions and immediately spent millions on Sun hardware and Oracle database software. Sun has to make their hardware the most attractive for key segments of a market that is using Java. They have a good start in their deals with Google. They need to build on that.
Re:Sun's commitement? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's nothing stopping you from implementing that MVC architecture in Java with a servlet container, of course - in fact, in my experience the vast majority of websites that use Java use it in exactly that way.
I'd Be Happy (Score:3, Interesting)
Three recent thorns in my side:
The Process object's destroy method sends a SIGINT or some such rot to the child process, which may or may not kill the child process. There's no way to send a SIGKILL, no way to get the PID of the process, no way to set the process group and no way to get or kill children of the child process.
There's no way to get OS-Specific permission settings on a File. For that reason if you try to archive some files in Java using an InputStream that takes Files, you'll lose the permissions settings on them and the files will restored with something both generic and useless like 644. They make a halfhearted attempt to address this in 1.5, but it's still useless.
It would appear that the only way to get disk space left on the volume is to open a file and start writing 1 byte at a time until you get an IO Exception.
It's deficiencies like this (And the ~50MB VM overhead) that make Java a poor choice for system programming tasks, but the robustness of the language design itself could be so easily changed to address these issues. The fact that it hasn't and that all of these issues have been around for over half a decade lead me to believe that Sun isn't really serious about the language and probably shouldn't be in charge of the standard, either.
Re:I wish Java was more like CPAN (Score:2, Interesting)
So you mean that the distribution should decide which modules/classes it should omit?
That could cripple the standard platform of Java modules developers can depend on. It could cause worst-case scenario's like this one [plan99.net], quoting:
Non issue? (Score:3, Interesting)
So what's Sun's angle here? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem (as I see it), is that it's too late for any kind of java desktop resurgence. How come Sun never produced any kind of Java Gnome/Gtk+ apps? They do employee Gnome contributors and Gnome is their desktop. Oh right....Swing is enough for everyone,*rollseyes*. Maybe four years ago if they had gotten behind Java gtk+, and made this move things would be different, but much of the open source desktop developers have moved on to Ruby, Python, and Mono. And there's still a lot of development done in C/C++. Even on the server side, many people are moving to LAMP+Ruby.
So my question is what is Sun's reasoning for doing it now?
Re:Hard.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole point of the "mumbo jumbo" is to get you to agree to the license terms. This is also the reason why the earlier versions of Firefox 1.5 (compiled, not the binaries) did not have the official branding enabled in Gentoo; it was a licensing issue. As soon as Gentoo got permission from the Mozilla Foundation to distribute the trademarked images in the source, they reenabled official branding in the ebuild.
But my question would be
Anyway, good news for Java. Now I don't have to resort to the Blackdown version.
Re:foster? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Java as electricity (Score:3, Interesting)
Even when I did, my employers did not like having to provide both a Sun workstation and a Windows box for every developer.
I remember when a spreadsheet first became available for a Sun Workstation. It was called Wingz.
Since it was a "powerful unix machine capable of supporting multiple users" they decided to charge
about $1000 for a spreadsheet program.
So for a long time, Unix software vendors kept your average business from moving to a Unix desktop.
About the same time, running Unix (SVR4) on PC hardware was also about $1000 for the OS.
My employer at the time also spent on the order of $100,000 for a CAD package that ran on Sun 3 (Motorola 68000
based) hardware. Shortly after that, Sun came out with SPARC. So no one wanted to
use the old CAD software on slower hardware, and they were never able to recharge the cost
of the CAD system back to projects.
At the time, there was still lots of software that could only run on VMS or Unix on mini-computers.
Today, much much more can be done on either Linux or Windows running on commodity hardware.
Companies only use commercial Unix hardware when the have to and when they don't have even bigger iron.
Java allows development teams to develop for Linux/Unix servers and give their developers one desktop
running Windows. You can have a Linux desktop if you find a castoff PC within the company to sit
next to your company-provided Windows desktop.
Lucky for me 1) I never bought Sun stock and 2) I learned Windows programming so I could stay employed.
To me, it looks like a big chunk of the job market for developers is divided between
I don't see how Sun is ever going to sell significantly more proprietary hardware than they do today.
People can buy Sun servers. But they don't have to. And with Java, they can port their server code to Linux
on XYZ vendor hardware.