It’s hip2b2

eWeek carries this article on an internal debate raging within Sun about the future of Java. One of the discussions involves the possible open sourcing of Java.

New Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s first 100 days at the helm are about to get interesting. First up: managing an internal debate over whether the company should open-source Java.

According to sources inside Sun, an ongoing debate over whether to open-source Java is coming to a head with the JavaOne conference looming May 16. Schwartz, who led the open-sourcing of Solaris, could not be reached for comment on the matter.

Of course, we all know that open source covers a lot of licenses (comment taken from Slashdot commentary). Solaris has been open sourced too under a non-GPL friendly license called CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). However, it is an OSI-compliant license. There are some major linking restrictions in CDDL that do not allow GPL-covered programs to be linked with CDDL-covered libraries. But, CDDL does provide some additional goodies like IP protection.

However, I believe the choice of CDDL versus GPL is not much of an issue for Java. For Solaris, the GPL incompatibility was added to ensure that the two (Linux and Solaris) do not merge code-bases. Sun would like to keep its Solaris community intact. However, Java already has a strong community of its own. Therefore, this won’t be a problem as Java does not intent to merge with another community like PHP.

Some things I would like from Java:

• Be more user friendly. Allow even the programmers with the most basic programming skills to be able to use some form of Java. Provide a way in which a test Hello World J2EE program can be written in one line. I prefer that learning Java be incremental instead of the current steep learning curve.
• Reduce Configuration File Cruft. This is one of the major issues with J2EE today. Too much hand tweaking of XML files is quite intimidating for the newbie. Standardized configuration tools compatible with multiple vendor development environments would be nice.
• Increased accessibility. Make it easier to start development with the presence of development and roll-out bundles. Sun has already been doing this for quite some time but it would be best to include roll-out bundles for production systems too. These bundles make it easier for newbies to try out the system. The LAMP/WAMP projects of the past definitely helped PHP gain popularity.
• Pre-configured with usable defaults. Release bundles that can be roll-out easily with Smart defaults. This way it would be easier to get a production system up at the shortest possible time.

Note that most of my requests center of increase usability. Basically, most of the people I speak too complain that Java is just takes too much to get into a usable state. My first exposure with J2EE (hmm. maybe some form of it) was with ATG Dynamo. The learning curve was pretty steep and needed a lot of pre-training. J2EE has gone a long way. It just needs a bit more user friendliness.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 12:51 am and is filed under Open source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.