On Sat, 2005-06-25 at 12:55 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Sat, Jun 25, 2005 at 12:50:48PM -0400, Ernest L. Williams Jr. wrote: > > > Sun's Java isn't free - period. Then live with the Java FC4 ships with > > > in Core. > > What about the java distro from IBM? Is that one open-source? > > Nope. No open source JVM currently exists. I checked your above statement with one of my trusted colleagues. Here is what I find: =========================================================================== The statement that "Sun's Java isnt even slightly open source" is clearly an exaggeration. Here are the facts: 1) You can register with Sun and go to Sun's Java sight and freely download the full source code for the JVMs that they distribute. Here is the link: http://www.sun.com/software/communitysource/j2se/java2/download.xml 2) Developers can join for free Sun's Java community development program to contribute code to the Java community. Here is the link: http://java.sun.com/developer/products/java2cs/ 3) Other companies use this source code to build their own JVMs. 4) What is smart about this approach is that the JVMs can be tailored to run the Java code optimally on the specific platform. It uses runtime optimization to shift a lot of responsibility to the JVM. If you run your applications on multiple platforms this makes a lot of sense. It relieves the developer of having to make platform specific considerations and optimizations in their code and places this strictly into the hands of the JVM where it belongs. Developers can focus on building solutions and let the experts deal with platform specific optimization and other issues. 5) Sun has the ultimate say and reserves the right to control what code gets accepted into the official Java distribution. 6) It isn't Java unless it meets the licensing requirements set forth by Sun. This ensures platform independence and a consistent definition of what defines Java. 7) I think the licensing terms are quite reasonable especially given the resources that Sun commits to it. Like most community projects, not everyone will get what they want. Splintering the community doesn't seem wise to me. Java has broad community support. The openness and freeness of Java has allowed for its wide adoption. Just consider the large number of J2EE products. There is a huge number of 100% pure Java libraries that are freely distributed and open source. Pure Java is a stable and supported solution. What we see are people trying to take advantage of Java's popularity and then splinter off their own variant (which is not legally Java) to get what they want. Java is by its pure nature platform independent (not just cross-platform). This allows you to distribute code without recompiling. The individual JVMs are required to meet certain restrictions so as to maintain platform independence and compatibility. This allows applications to be posted on a server and run without modification on Linux, Mac, Windows and Solaris machines and any other JVM compliant platform. > > > Well, anyway I think a JVM is unnecessary overhead!! I would prefer > > native code; so maybe I should stick with FC4's java distro. > > It's actually pretty amazingly efficient. The perceived slowness of Java > comes from the historically horrible GUI libraries. > > > Now is FC4's java distro basically GCJ (from the GNU Compiler > > Collection)? > > Yes. > > -- > Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> > Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/> > Current office temperature: 80 degrees Fahrenheit. >
