JAVAONE: Open source Java debate rages

Panel offers mixed views

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 07/05/04

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"You can find every last wart that everybody has ever found," pertaining to Java, he said.

"You can download the full sources of J2SE," he said.

"When you download the SDK, you get all the sources for all the APIs, and really the source is all out there," Gosling said.

Gosling warned that allowing multiple, open source implementations of Java technologies could yield the incompatibilities that happened with Unix and is happening again with Linux distributions. "They're really close and they're almost interoperable but they're just different enough to be a pain in the butt," said Gosling.

But Behlendorf argued that Java technologies already behave differently on different platforms. Java Message Service, for example, is slower on some platforms and that has to be accommodated, he said.

Many developers at JavaOne this week viewed the idea of releasing parts of Java, including J2SE, under an open source license favorably, saying it could speed up the development of parts of the platform like the JavaSpaces distributed application platform or the J2ME multimedia layer.

But most of the focus on open sourcing Java lies in the J2SE platform used in desktops and servers. Because of licensing changes to the JCP, the upcoming J2SE Version 5, also called Tiger, will be the first version that could theoretically be released under an open source license.

Whether Sun itself releases an open source implementation of J2SE, however, is not particularly important, because the release of Tiger will open the door for open source implementations of the platform, in much the same way that the release of J2EE 1.4 let projects like JBoss become certified, said Bruno Ferreira de Souza, a consultant with Summa Technologies Inc.

De Souza believes that Sun could be more effective in lending technical support to existing open source projects, like Kaffe, than by starting its own open source J2SE project.

Robert McMillan of the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate, contributed to this story