Comments on: Sun, do you REALLY care about Free Software?

By: oomu

oomu — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:49:36 +0000

java is not solaris or even opensolaris.

By: Justin

Justin — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:27:05 +0000

here is an experiment: Try and download a solaris install iso without having to sign up for a sun.com user account and give personal information.

By: oomu

oomu — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:57:23 +0000

opening (and freeing) of JAVA is _true_

java 7 will be gpl2. it’s not “would” or “should”, it’s _will_ , a fact , a truth

no more doubt

I saw (meetings and conferences) enough sun talk with sun employees about future of java to have understand the message : “YES it’s True Dammit!”

some part of java are already gpl (hotspot for example, it’s not insignifiant)

some stuff (2D rasterization for example) are still IP-encumbered. it will stop java 6 to be free(dom), but Sun is sure the code will be rewritten in 2007. not 2009 or 2050 : 2007

Java 7 is announced for 2008, maybe 2009. but we will see a gpl source of all sun java classes for developpers before that.

so
it’s not IF, it’s REAL. Sun is REALLY freeing 6 MILLIONS of Source Code.

they’re REALLY moving from a proprietary software control source code to an open one (cvs or subversion, I forgot) , _now_.
they are working on it from one year.

they will not stop until all java is free.

https://openjdk.dev.java.net/

By: Max

Max — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:02:00 +0000

I definitly recomment watching the Freeing Java talk from fosdem. Some higher Sun guy explaining their strategy.
http://fosdem.org/2007/media/video

Was quite convincing for me. Sun opening up java did not come as that much of a surprise anyway. They have been preparing that for a long time. I was way more surprised to see them opening Solaris.

Anyway lots of great news coming from suns side. They also seem to be quite involved in gnome developement - which i really welcome.