I updated my article at http://www.vimbrij.com/subhash/javafuture.html

It looks like the problem is Sun 'bet the company on Java' and so has IBM. Microsoft has bet the company on killing it. The economics prevent any hope of compromise...

Hypocrisy at its finest! IBM is notoriously proprietary yet admonishes Sun. IBM's only interested in monopolozing Java. IBM will lockdown and monopolize Java for its own gain, and gee let's see maybe destroy BEA in the process. Now there's a kinder and gentler company -- too funny.

Linux platform divergence is not nearly the problem protrayed by Mr. Gosling, and certainly not a credible argument for the continued lock down of Java.

Market forces must always come into play. As RedHat, SuSE, and other major distributions meet with greater acceptance; they automatically create de-facto standards, as does any successful open code. There is no need for the blessing of some sanctioning body. In fact, even the ''big-guys'' can have their standards co-opted by a lone programmer, with a really cool idea.

This is the essence of open source; and of freedom itself.

To be sure, governments and corporations can force standards; however, I believe that most of the strongest, and longest-lived standards will be those recognized, and adopted as such, freely, by a community of peers.

Gosling is right in that many people that don''t want to work with Windows but want to make a living developing software embrace Java because it gives them the opportunity to work in their favourite environment - Linux. That is at least true for myself. I consider myself in the Linux fold, like Gosling says, and I develop Java. Having said that, there are very few client side java applications I use, but for server side stuff and web applications, Java is great.

I think that opensourcing Java would in fact create a whole host of problems, including incompatibilities. Everything that the OpenSource community wants is possible right now through the SCSL. You can go get the source. You can change it and use it for your own use in ways that you want. But, you can't distribute it as Java without licensing it and meeting the JCK.

I'd much rather Sun focus on making it possible to download the distribution and build a working implementation without having to spend weeks figuring out their build environment.

make config
make
make install

should be all that's needed. Even better would be

ant -f config.ant
ant -f build.ant
ant -f install.ant

would be event more useful to the community than some kind of licensing change. Then when there is a JVM bug that sun can't address in the time that I need it dealt with, I can build my own fix for my use and then send it to them.

There is a certain level of immaturity in many of the things that I hear people talking about adding to the JVM. Certainly, there are things that I'd like to see get in, that keep getting pushed off. But, I haven't participated in the community to make those things that I want to happen, happen. So, I can't expect that I can sit in a corner and complain, and someone will do it for me.

The time spend participating in the community that exists would be equivalent to spending time hacking on a separate source tree. The difference is that working with the community is going to be much more beneficial to everyone than sitting around doing my own thing...

I agree with a lot of the points discussed above. In fact I wrote an article questioning the future of Java at http://vimbrij.dyndns.biz/subhash/javafuture.html. My concern is about the usability of the JCP model. I believe Sun looks at open source as a way to get free developers of IP for the original owners of the code, and JCP has been constructed in that same form. The result, not too many participants are willing to donate real work to the JCP as Sun would end up owning the IP ...

sourceforge offers the following stats:

- C (13785 projects)

- C++ (13922 projects)

- Java (12588 projects)

That places the three languages at roughly the same level.
No other languages come even close to these numbers.

My company uses macromedia''s coldfusion extensively, the latest version is a J2EE application. The linux version has proved to be incredibly reliable. Other CF users might like to comment on their experience ??, but I think this a very good example of how good the linux/java combination can be

Using Java and Linux is really a great long term solution that allows can keep you TCO down for a long period of time including migration to normally incompatible systems. For most companies they are afraid to change their platforms because all their custom applications will not work on the new platform or will have a lot of problems. That is where Linux and Java come in. Linux as an OS runs on many different platforms x86, PPC, Sparc, ARM and more. Java can run on many different OSs. So if they wanted to switch to a different hardware platform then all their software will still work or if they don''t like linux any more then they can switch to an other OS without loosing their applications. That is the Beauty of Linux and Java it doesn''t put you in a Box of what you need to run and who you will need to pay to keep you business going.

Java is heavily used by the business world, not necessarily by hackers. When the business world started moving from Windows/UNIX to Linux, what do you think greased the wheels? Java. People realized that WebSphere and WebLogic worked just as well on Linux as on Windows/UNIX, for less cost. Do you really think business people would have moved if they had had to bear the significant cost of porting apps?

I followed the live webcast and I would have to disagree with Lawrence Lessig on his point. His premise that Java is not being adopted by the Linux community because it''s not OSS is not based on any figures and was one of the weakest stances in the debate (together with the Sun guy arguing against Open Source Java because it would make the VM not as stable as it is now). However, when I look around I see Linux and Java together everywhere! I personally use Java daily in the form of Tomcat and Eclipse. Actually, our company is deploying Java on Linux at all our customers. Most of the development team is also standardizing on Eclipse. So at least from where I''m standing at Linux and Java are quite happy together and being very productive too...

As for releasing Java under OSS, I''m all for it. I only have to look at the Apache Jakarta community for an excellent example of how (Java) technology thrives under OSS

I would like to comment that making Java open-source, task tremendous at core, needs to happen, as Java would much greatly benefit from a more free approach to contributing of the APIs and frameworks, than going through JCP. I say that, because I believe and this is solely my judgment, that JCP is heavily biased towards the evaluation of the contributions and graduation of such contribution to become a part of Java Core. It is biased by the fact of recognizing contribution from well established players (Apache, BEA, IBM and Sun itself) and there are a low percentage of other contributors, such that are not affiliated with any of the above mentioned groups. Such bias tends to worsen the Core APIs of Java with submissions that we are told to be leading edge technology and methodology where in practice such submission are impractical, heavy-weight and sometimes unusable. Take JSF for example and compare to more elegant approach like Spring or WebWork. Out of collections of JSR I have not seen a single one to do with better memory management, including more eloquent garbage collection and monitoring. I know there are people with ideas out there, but it is more than tough for them to get through the JCP approval process not being backed by a well-established open source player. It is a shame and that is why the open-source Java, though still with some approval, community driven though, will bring more benefit to the Open source and Java community.

Arg!!! A little extra research showed that despite the ESR letter pre-dating the original IBM letter, the trigger incident was earlier and, indeed, initiated by IBM, so, I stand corrected. Then again these sorts of things can be fairly ephemeral, so I won''t be too surprised to discover that there''s more to it than my meagre research revealed.

It''s funny that you give Rod Smith of IBM credit for starting this discussion on openning Java, when it was Eric S. Raymond''s ''Let Java Go'' open letter (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/let-java-go) that really got the ball rolling. Of course, the way your article is worded, you can say that it was small, grassroots or not taken seriously until the IBM letter, but I think that ESR at least deserves a mention in this article.