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November 13, 2006
Java licenses
Java licenses: The link goes to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO, announcing GNU Public License on Sun's J2SE (desktop), J2EE (server) and J2ME (mobile) runtime engines. Tim Bray has more. Like most others, I'm not sure what effect it may have. I'm surprised the story didn't get much play on MXNA or Technorati... felt like it should have more effect than that. Adobe works with Java in a number of ways, from writing it (ColdFusion), to using it (LiveCycle and other servers), to being compared with it (Flash Lite). I didn't pick up much in conversation with other staffers today, either... no clear internal takeaway that I found. How about you? Do you think this announcement may have an effect on your own work? if so, how? Thanks!
Posted by JohnDowdell at November 13, 2006 06:31 PM
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Comments
Pardon me for being kind of ignorant, but I thought Java was open source as in the JDK, etc was GPL as in you can use it to develop with as long as the sources arent modified. What more freedom does this give us now?
Posted by: Austin at November 13, 2006 09:14 PM
Austin, you have free (gratis) confused with open source. Open source means the freedom to modify and redistribute.
Posted by: Manish Jethani at November 14, 2006 04:14 AM
I hate the labels, because most of the arguments end up being about understanding the labels, rather than understanding what we can do.... :(
I re-read David Berlind's ten screenfuls of text about this, and it still seems like he's talking mostly about "this license means this and that license means that"... maybe I missed some realworld effect mixed in there somewhere....
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3937
Larry Dignan adds that no one publicly knows the financial impact to Sun, because Java economics have traditionally been occluded: "Sun's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission also don't yield a lot of clues about how much money the company was yielding from Java. The conventional wisdom is that Sun has failed to monetize Java–a contention that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz danced around in a May Q&A with Forbes."
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3940
He follows up with the odd choice of putting a technical announcement into a chat session in a virtual 3D world:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3942
Posted by: John Dowdell at November 14, 2006 12:56 PM
Matt Asay concisely makes a key point: Sun chose GPL rather than Apache hosting/licensing in order to prevent IBM from using Java. I'm not sure *why* they'd care about this particularly, but the observation helps explain why most of the conversation was about licensing plans, rather than actual abilities.
Posted by: John Dowdell at November 14, 2006 01:41 PM
"bbum" (Bob Bumgardner, maybe?) offers a concise and meaningful synopsis of all this licensing discussion... if you use Java in a product you can't charge for it unless you pay Sun money.
"So, by going GPL, Sun has vastly reduced their licensing administrative costs, effectively hired an effective license enforcement army, and ensured that if anyone actually does something interesting with the technology it’ll either be given away for free or Sun will be paid to keep quiet about it. A win-win situation, it would seem."
http://www.friday.com/bbum/2006/11/13/java-now-open-sort-of-source/
Commenters draw the discussion back into the realm of "what did that clause mean, no you're confusing it with some other license".
A followup has a clear idea: "Let me be utterly simplistic and blunt: The GPL is not a free license very much because it limits your freedom to do what you want with whatever it is that is under the GPL. Period." He later gets into the beer-vs-speech rap, though.
Posted by: John Dowdell at November 14, 2006 03:51 PM