In November 2006, Sun Microsystems began making all of its Java technology implementations open source, offering them under the GPL. More than two years later, reactions are mixed as to what exactly has been the impact of this momentous change.
Some, including the chief executive at Eclipse Foundation and Sun's own James Gosling, considered the father of Java, have seen little impact. "That was mostly about community relations," says Gosling, who is CTO of the client software group at Sun. "So far, I think it hasn't had too much [effect]," says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse, which was spawned in an IBM-based effort to build Java tools.
[ Sun also has made its Solaris Unix open source, an effort belittled by the Linux Foundation. Is Solaris on its deathbed? ]
But Sun's Jeet Kaul, senior vice president for the Java client group at Sun, sees it differently: "We have gotten a lot of people who have taken up the code and started building solutions with it. So the adoption that we have had, the adoption curve has grown dramatically ever since we did open source," he says. But he could not cite specific adoption figures.
"Sun's revenue for Java has increased ever since we did open source and has increased by double-digit numbers," Kaul says. Opportunities have increased in areas such as support, services, and solutions, and Java revenues will grow in 2009, he adds.
The open sourcing of Java had been sought by parties such as IBM and BEA Systems, which argued that such a move would boost innovation. Sun initially resisted, citing concerns about potential forking of the platform. But the company relented and made the switch, arguing that the open source move would inspire a new phase of developer collaboration and innovation.
Today, open source implementations from Sun include OpenJDK for Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), GlassFish for Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), and Mobile & Embedded Community for Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME).
Java now more easily bundled with open source tools
Sun urged the open source community to include the GPL-enabled distribution of the Java Development Kit as part of open source repositories commonly included with GNU/Linux distributions. And it has had some success in that effort; for example, OpenJDK ships as part of the Red Hat Fedora Linux variant. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, unveiled on Tuesday, also features OpenJDK.
Java for Linux had long been available for download, so in a sense it was as accessible as any open source code, says Gosling. But to let open source providers include the Java code in their products required a new licensing agreement at Sun, which took some time to develop. Today, Debian, Red Hat, and Ubuntu are license-compatible with Java and thus can bundle it, he adds. The open source move by Sun has made it much easier to get Java on Linux, concurs Geir Magnusson, Jr., director of the Apache Software Foundation.
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