Just a quick couple of updates to yesterday's post on Java being released under the GPL.
First, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz blogged about the news, and used his bloggy pulpit to add another twist to the story:
And in closing, I want to put one nagging item to rest.
By admitting that one of the strongest motivations to select the GPL was the announcement made last week by Novell and Microsoft, suggesting that free and open source software wasn't safe unless a royalty was being paid. As an executive from one of those companies said, "free has to have a price."
That's nonsense.
Free software can be free of royalties, and free of impediments to broadscale, global adoption and deployment. Witness what we've done with Solaris, and now, what we've done with Java. Developers are free to pick up the code, and create derivatives. Without royalty or obligation.
Schwartz is striking directly at the heart of the SCO-y overtones of the Novell/Microsoft announcement. The implication of that deal being that Novell's SUSE customers, unpaid programmers, or SUSE contributors, are somehow safer than Red Hat's customers and developers (to pick a distro at random) because Novell was paying royalties to Redmond.
While we're on Microsoft's dog in this OpenJDK fight, David "Between the Lines" Berlind raises this interesting .NET angle to the freeing of Java:
Where might the impact on .Net be felt first? Well, there are millions of developers out there all working with different languages most of which are not compatible with either Java or .Net. That's right. Compared to the number of languages that work with one or the other, there are many more that do not. Now that Java is being open sourced, the way has been paved for developers who want to connect their favorite language to the Java Virtual Machine to actually scratch that itch. In other words, in the past, it may have taken an act of Sun in order to get dynamic language support for some languages the way it has for Ruby. And, if there's one thing that can really put an open ecosystem on turbo-chargers, it's dynamic language support. Microsoft's .Net, by the way, offered dynamic language support long before Java did. But now, it will be far easier for the Java community to marshall the resources of the open developer community to cultivate a wider range of dynamic language support.
You can, of course, see this as a defensive move for Sun, which hasn't seen a lot of Java at the heart of Web 2.0. Gaining some traction for their platform entails broader language and framework support, and that's what OpenJDK can help them accomplish, without massive investment on Sun's part. So the debate is no longer: .NET supports multiple languages, but only runs on Windows (hence Mono) vs Java runs on multiple OSes, but only supports one langauge.
Watching these implications unfold is fascinating. I guess the bottom line is that Java really is free in the sense of freedom: the freedom to expand the platform into places Sun alone couldn't have taken it. With that kind of freedom to move, who knows what the future holds.
Tags: Java, GPL, OpenJDK, Microsoft, Novell, .NET, SUSE, Red Hat