Sun Takes Baby Steps Closer to Open Source Java

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Having buried the hatchet with archrival Microsoft a year ago, Sun Microsystems, the creator and steward of the Java programming language and related runtime environments for desktops and servers, still can't quite let go of it. But with the upcoming "Mustang" Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) due early next year, Sun will be offering a new license that it hopes will spur community contribution. Many doubt it will.

There are over 3 million Java programmers in the world, and it has taken Sun, IBM, Oracle, and thousands of other Java-happy organizations 10 years to get that number of programmers to come into the Java fold. But Sun wants 10 million Java programmers, which will give Java, Java Virtual Machines, and J2SE/J2EE some strength in numbers compared to Microsoft's similar C#, Common Language Runtime and .NET framework alternatives. Sun doesn't have 20 years to get to that 10 million Java programmer mark, and neither do other companies who have bet on Java. Moreover, as I have pointed out in the past, Java is about itself, not about Sun, and if Sun really wanted it to be a standard, it would create an independent Java consortium with IBM, Oracle, others, and even Microsoft and get on with trying to make Java easier to program with. I am even naïve enough to suggest that Java and .NET should be merged into a single programming environment. Whether or not any of that happens, I believe that for Java to be a standard--a real one that everyone has input into--Sun has to become one of the many players in Java, just as there are many contributors in Linux, Apache, and other open source projects.

Sun knows that it needs to attract more developers to the Java platform, and that is why, according to James Gosling, chief technology officer of the Developer Platforms Group at Sun and co-creator of Java, and Graham Hamilton, a Sun Fellow and vice president in the Software Group, explained recently that the Mustang implementation of the J2SE platform would have three licenses that move a bit closer to the kind of open source licensing that real open source programs have. These include the Java Internal User License (JIUL, which is pronounced "jewel," ironically enough), the Java Distribution License (JDL), and the Java Research License (JRL).

In its defense, Sun has spent a boatload of money on Java and makes very little back for its trouble, and the executives are worried about Java splintering into many factions should it let go of it. This happened to BSD Unix, which is at the heart of Solaris, as well as the dozens of Unix variants that came and went over the course of 30 years. Ironically, we are down to four Unixes and one pseudo-Unix, for all intents and purposes: BSD, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX plus Linux. Splintering in Unix most definitely caused incompatibilities, but it also drove innovation. The question you have to ask is this: were the costs associated with the incompatibilities of divergent and then converging Unixes offset by the benefits of competition? I think we all know the answer to that question, and I lament the fracturing of Unix as much as anyone. The same could hold true for Java. An intrepid group of programmers, hell-bent on trouble with lots of lawyers to help them stay alive, would create a black-box combination JVM/CLR runtime that could support Java and C# code and settle the matter once and for all.

In the meantime, Sun is going to streamline the Java Community Process, the method by which Sun has for years accepted code changes in the Java environment, so it is more open. And it will be tweaking its licensing terms for Java technology. These changes come just as Danese Cooper, Sun's "open source diva," has left his job steering Sun's open source community efforts for a job at Intel, and George Paolini, the Sun executive who set up the Java Community Process back in 1998 for Sun, has left for a job at SAP to build and promote a community behind that company's NetWeaver middleware.

The three new Java licenses replace the Sun Community Source License (SCSL, and often said aloud as the derogatory-sounding "scuzzle"), which was announced two years ago and met with much grumbling by an open source community used to real openness in their standards and licenses. The SCSL was so complex that you needed a lawyer to figure out what you could and could not do. So now, Sun is forking its licenses (as opposed to forking Java) so there is a license to cover three different situations.

Last year, Sun broke out a portion of the SCSL and created the Java Research License to allow colleges and universities to muck around with Java and make changes to it as part of their research. This is how Unix, Linux, and thousands of other programs over the years have been adopted and improved in the past four decades, since the computer centers at colleges and universities tend to be, like government-sponsored computing centers, on the bleeding edge. Because these institutions do not have battalions of lawyers or patience with complex licensing agreements (remember, they have been using Linux, Apache, and Sendmail, and other open source programs for a decade now), Sun is trying to keep the JRL down to a page or two of legalese.

The JRL is now joined by the Java Distribution license, which is for commercial companies--like IBM and Oracle--who want to get Java and make changes to it as part of their Java-based products. This license has testing and trademark requirements, and is not intended for data centers deploying Java technologies. The most interesting license is the Java Internal User License (JIUL), which will allow companies to make changes to Java for their own internal use without violating their licenses and allow them to propose any changes they make back into the Java community process.

Sun will be hammering out the final drafts of these three licenses over the coming months as it readies the Mustang implementation of J2SE. It is ironic that having just taken the real jewel of Sun open source--the Solaris operating system--to the open source community as OpenSolaris, Sun can't seem to do the same thing for Java. Sun makes money on Solaris, but only has influence through Java. It is truly puzzling. OpenSolaris was released under the very liberal Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL) that Sun created because of what Sun viewed as the deficiencies in intellectual property protection and licensing terms of the several dozen other open source licenses. If CDDL is good enough for the crown jewels, why isn't it good enough for Java?

Sun is apparently less concerned with the forking of Solaris than it is with the splintering of Java. But Java can also be shattered, like a coffee mug, if you hold it too tightly.