When the Sun goes down - what happens to the OpenJDK?

[Geir Magnusson Jr.]

On Apr 21, 2009, at 6:23 AM, Mario Torre wrote:

> Il giorno mar, 21/04/2009 alle 10.41 +0100, Andrew Haley ha scritto:
>
>> A nice idea, but I doubt that'll happen.  As we know, TCK access has
>> always been Sun's most jealously guarded prize.
>
> But now the risk of having to do everything from scratch, with an  
> entity
> that could have different goals and objectives than Sun, is high.
>
> Oracle has some reputation of being unfriendly with the JCP even, so I
> share Volker's fears, controlling the TCK could make it worse.

I'm not sure what you mean here about Oracle.  (BTW, I think that  
Volker is *right on* in general)

My experience with them on the JCP is that they've been very  
supportive of openness and implementors having the freedom (not  
'Freedom') to do with their code as they see fit, a value that Sun  
provably doesn't share.

I have no real understanding of what they'll think about using the GPL  
going forward - they may leverage the downstream restrictions placed  
on users the same way Sun has in order to preserve the licensing  
revenue, but maybe not.  Either way, shouldn't affect this community  
that much.

My guess is that they are going to stop the silly games with the TCKy  
have it.  Oracle doesn't strike me as a company afraid of competing in  
a market.

>
>
> Also, I don't know how much experience Oracle has in handling big
> Free/Open Source Software projects, but apart from contribution to
> Apache and PHP I doubt they can be considered an "Open Source"  
> company,
> like Sun is from basically the very beginning. Of course, this will be
> something that has to be managed by the same people that are working  
> on
> that at Sun (and this is valid for every other Sun product like  
> Solaris,
> NetBeans and so on).
>

I think you are correct here, but as you say, they can keep the same  
people from Sun and start building their own experience in this area.

> Maybe it's time to try to have some sort of real foundation to drive  
> the
> JCP and OpenJDK, this could help with the TCK too. I would likely see
> Red Hat and some other Linux distributors like Canonical to jump into
> this.

While I agree that making both of those independent is a good idea, I  
don't want to link the two - JCP and OpenJDK - since I think that  
general ecosystem governance should be kept separate from the  
implementation of any spec, including the RI of one of the platform  
specs.

geir