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For the technology to succeed, it needs a strong developer community. A strong community can give Jini technology the critical mass it needs to establish ubiquity while accelerating the development of innovative Jini services. Just as Jini's core strength lies in spontaneous assembly of distributed networks of clients and services, Sun hopes a core strength of the Jini community will be similar self-assembly around mutually beneficial development projects.
The Jini technology development community
Under the process being jointly defined by community members, interested developers can join discussions, review and exchange source code, and become involved in working groups by registering on the Jini Community Web site (see Resources). In order to register, you must agree to the terms of the Sun Community Source License (SCSL), which is used to protect secured areas of the community site. This protection is put in place so that community members can be free to share their innovations in a nonthreatening forum while also ensuring the value to the community of the Jini trademark is preserved.
Note that when you "click through" the license on the Jini Web site, you're asked whether you represent yourself or your company. If you accept on behalf of your company, all other employees of your company are subject to the license terms and conditions you agree to. Make sure to read through the license carefully and check with management if you have any doubt about whether you're qualified to act on behalf of the company.
To empower the community and enable rapid growth and acceptance of Jini, Sun is making core Jini technology, including the source code for Sun's implementation, available for download from the community site. The SCSL is an amalgam of open source principles and for-profit licensing models of the past. It has been crafted in the spirit of openness avowed in Eric Raymond's now-famous article, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (see Resources for the URL for this article as well as related open source resources).
Support for the Jini community
In order to help developers better understand the nascent Jini community, its processes and procedures, and the SCSL license and its implications, Sun hosted a Jini community birds-of-feather (BOF) session at JavaOne. Prominent jini-user mailing list members and Sun representatives Ken Arnold and Jimmy Torres outlined Sun's notions of how the community might structure and run itself, then answered questions from attendees.
Arnold explained that the supporting framework for the Jini community is comprised of:
- SCSL for Jini
- Jini community process being developed by community members
- jini.org Web site
- Jini development team at Sun, acting as "shepherds" for new projects and working groups
- Jini trademark and logo
What, you might ask, is meant by defining the Jini development team as shepherds? The idea is that Sun wants to help Jini projects run by other members of the community, for instance the printer working group organized by a number of prominent printer manufacturers. Sun provides assistance by having one or more experts on the Jini technology assist the working group with any Jini technology-specific questions they might have. This allows the working group to focus on domain-specific issues (in this example, the details of distributed printing) which they and their companies know much better than does Sun. In the end, shepherds are meant to foster the rapid development of sets of standard interfaces for various network services (like printing, storage, etc.) that the entire community can agree upon and from which everyone can benefit.
- Feedback
Resources
- The Jini Community home page details how you can get involved with Jini technology development. Community members can create
development areas for nascent Jini projects, discuss development issues with other Jini developers, and in general benefit
from the Jini Community and their experience
http://www.jini.org/ - Participate in the great Jini debate -- join Jini mailing lists to discuss the technology, the community, and specific Jini
ideas and projects. Requires agreement to SCSL (username and password for login)
http://developer.jini.org/developerforum.html - The Jini project information page outlines the various Jini projects being worked on by members of the community
http://developer.jini.org/projlist.html - Sun's main Jini technology site contains community as well as technical information
http://www.sun.com/jini/ - Still confused about the Sun Community Source License for Jini? Read the SCSL FAQ
http://www.sun.com/jini/licensing/scslfaq.html - Download the Jini technology code. Requires SCSL agreement
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/products/jini/ - Need more information on the technical underpinnings of Jini? Read the companion article on Jini technology in the JavaOne Today show daily
http://www.javaworld.com/javaone99/j1-99-jini.html - Read the abstract for the Jini Community BOF at JavaOne 1999
http://industry.java.sun.com/javaone/99/event/0,1768,1007,00.html - Why did Netscape open up the code for Communicator? Why are Linux and Apache so successful? Why has Sun followed suit and
begun to open up many of its technologies under a community source model? Read the declaration of open source principles that
gave these recent developments motion, Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-paper.html - Longtime open source supporter O'Reilly & Associates has made its new book of essays on open source, Open Sources Voices from the Open Source Revolution, available for free on its Web site. Bravo, O'Reilly!
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html
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