Call it vaporware, call it software development myth, call it whatever you wan’t but this has been hanging around for quite a while. For some years, too many I would say, the big question in the Java world was when, or even wether, Sun was releasing its “crown jewel”, using the words of father of the Java programming language. That day has come and Sun relicenses Java under GPL, finally!…
Java has been the cradle of many successful open source projects (like Hibernate, Apache Lucene or Spring Framework to name a few), but has always remained a closed implementation since its beginning, something that never made sense any to me. That approach had its problems over the years, and a fine example of that is EJB: the previous implementations (until EJB 2.1) have grown to became a huge and complex API, and not close to what the developers were really needing; but with EJB 3.0, which had a much larger developer input, things were different and it’s a huge step forward. So that’s why I think this is a huge improvement, as I’m hoping that the inputs from the developer community will lead to even more improvements from now on, and eventually lead to the redesign of some the existing Java libraries.
But one question that comes to my mind right now: how will this affect alternative open source implementations of the Java runtime?
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