Journal: Project Looking Glass Open Source Announcement

Sun Microsystems is contributing Project Looking Glass, based on
Java(tm) technology, to the open source community. Project Looking Glass is
an exploration project to bring innovative 3D features to the desktop
environment. The desktop interface will offer an intuitive, new 3D
environment to interact with desktop applications featuring window
transparency, rotation, zoom, multiple desktop workspaces and
miniaturization.Project Looking Glass offers a platform to realize far richer and more
entertaining user experience for existing and new applications in 2D or
3D. The technology enables developers to build highly visual 3D desktops
and applications that will run on Linux systems such as Sun's Java
Desktop System. The Solaris(tm) environment will be supported in near
future.

What does this mean to you?
---------------------------
If you're a software developer, please go to
http://enews.sun.com/CTServlet?id=63058945142818830:1088531213971 and
download this early version of the code and join the community in
developing the 3D desktop.

Interested in using the Project Looking Glass? The project is in very
early stages and a commercial version is not available yet. Please go to
http://enews.sun.com/CTServlet?id=63058945142818830:1088531213990 to
keep up to date on our progress.

Why Open Source?
----------------
Project Looking Glass is in its infancy, and we'd like to explore lots
of ideas and possibilities. We're releasing the Project Looking Glass
code to the whole community to explore every aspect of the technology
rather than restricting access to a privileged few. We believe this open
development is an excellent model to pursue this exciting and vast
opportunity. So, your involvement is eagerly anticipated. We believe new
dimension of developer innovation by making Sun's cutting edge
technology available at Sun's 3D Desktop Technology Open Source Project on
java.net.

We have been working for several months on cleaning the software up,
providing basic features and functionality key to 3D window management. A
key focus was looking at the existing 2D desktop applications, ensuring
minimal compatibility and performance problems. The next step is to
look what else we can do to foster real world 3D interactivity. We decided
to open source this at a very early stage to ensure that we got good
feedback from the community.

What's in the Open Source Project?
----------------------------------
The following features are now available in the Project Looking Glass
open source release:

3D Window Manager Platform - Java 3D based highly scalable 3D platform
with client-server model support.

3D Window Manager and Application Development API - Java API to develop
new 3D desktop applications and 3D desktop Window Manager features.

Native Application Integration Module - Allows developers to run
conventional X11 applications in the 3D environment.

Sample 3D Window Manager - provides a simple sample implementation for
testing and demonstration purposes

3D Environment Lite - Enables developers to run a simplified 3D
environment as an application on a Java 3D enabled platform including Linux
and Solaris environments. This serves as a development tool to test
implementations.

This is all available at:
http://enews.sun.com/CTServlet?id=63058945142818830:1088531213971

What's the licensing model?
---------------------------
There are three license choices for developers interested in creating
applications using Project Looking Glass.

For developers who are interested in reviewing, revising, and
redistributing the source code as part of their own application, Project Looking
Glass has been submitted as an Open Source project on java.net under
the GNU Public License, or GPL.

For developers who are interested in developing an application on top
of the existing Project Looking Glass platform without reviewing and/or
altering the code base, there is a binary version of the current state
of the project available for download under a traditional Binary Code
License. This is also available on java.net.

Finally, for developers or organizations interested in other uses or
revising the source code but wish to keep their implementation and
related application proprietary, please contact Sun at
[e-mail].