On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 20:59 +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
Stefano Maffulli stef@zoomata.com writes:
Would it make sense /business wise/ not to release the rest of the code?
If they have a product with 10 parts, they might want to continue their current business model with that product. So they might free 9 parts and keep one token part proprietary.
From what I've read, it's certain that not all of the Java standard API
will be GPL'd : there will be holes because Sun don't have all the rights to code.
However, what is being suggested is that Java SE 6 will be shipped more or less as-is (this is the next release being prepared, and is apparently almost ready), while Java SE 7 (which is what is being GPL'd) would be entirely Free - requiring the "holes" to be filled in.
It will take time for the stack, as shipped by Sun for production use, comes with equivalent source code. We're probably talking a couple of years, if we're honest, but I don't see anything on their roadmap which suggests a medium/long term Free/proprietary mix. So, you could rightly celebrate this at a number of points: the initial announcement, the release of the standard VM, the release of the runtime API, the release of a production version based on Free code - it's just different points on the road.
It's a bit like when they released StarOffice: the first few releases of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice were quite different, based on different code and with different abilities. Over time, that's changed, and StarOffice is now built from OpenOffice.org, and the proprietary parts have been replaced by Free alternatives. There are still odd proprietary bits - a migration wizard, for example - but the trend is pretty obvious.
I'm hopeful that this whole process will be a lot quicker with Java too, since the system is much smaller compared to OOo, and there are already people working on similar systems - I think community involvement will be a lot stronger.
Cheers,
Alex.