Sun has open sourced Java. Finally. This is good news, but is it too late? I wonder what changed Sun's mind on this? Has their Java source licensing revenue dropped so much that it didn't matter anymore? Does that mean people have already moved beyond Java? Sun seems to have done good things with the license. There's a GPL exception for classpaths so you can load proprietary libraries, that's good (well rms probably doesn't think so). They still own and license the brand which seems to be based on compatibility tests, so for as good as the tests are, things called Java should remain interoperable.
The open source community has for the most part avoid Java, will they be willing to switch now? Certainly Linux distributions will now come with Java. Will applications start depending on it? How many runtime environments do we want to support? 10 years from now will there be different distributions that seek to optimize the system by choosing packages that use the same language environment to avoid instantiating too many? Another aspect of this, will alternate byte-compiled languages that run on the JVM become more popular? The JVM is pretty high quality, with Python/Jython or Ruby benefit from it?
No comments:
Post a Comment