At Last! Open Source Java

It’s finally happened! Sun has released Java under an open source license. Not only that, they did it in the best possible way: using GPL version 2, not some bizarre concoction of their own. Congratulations to Jonathan Schwartz, James Gosling, and everyone else involved with this decision.

What’s surprising, of course, is how long it took. We’ve talked about it for years, written articles and editorials–but after lots of “maybe next year,” some of us never really believed it would happen. And it’s worth noting that a complete JDK hasn’t yet been released; just the compiler (javac) and the Hot Spot VM, with the rest of the JDK coming in the first half of 2007. But what’s available under the GPL today is substantial: as Gosling has said on a number of occasions, the JVM is the crown jewel.

So, now that we have the crown jewels in our hands, and the other bits coming in a few months, we need to ask the hard question. Is it too little, too late? It’s certainly not too little. But too late?

Sun has always been a company that many developers have loved to hate. People have been dancing on Java’s grave ever since Gosling first gave us a look at a USENIX conference back in 1995. I know–I was there. I doubt that this announcement will convince any of the historical Java-bashers. For them, the license is irrelevant.

More to the point: Java has been the birthing ground or proving ground for many important technologies: the first web containers, Jini, JXTA, aspect-oriented programming, Hibernate, and Spring, to name a few. Lucene made it easy for developers to integrate sophisticated search engines into their applications. The JAIN community had a working, web-startable SIP phone long before VoIP became popular. EJB first interested me because I could see a way to write a database application without writing SQL. That idea is still pretty radical. GPL’d Java will do a lot to make the achievements of the Java community more visible: more people will be willing to look at what Java developers are doing, and take advantage of the great wealth of innovation that Java has driven.

For More Information look into the below URL
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2006/11/at_last_open_source_java.html