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Simon Phipps, speaking at a briefing in London on Tuesday, told Builder UK that he's long held the belief that coders working with Java don't care whether the source code is available for their platform.
"I'm not sure it changes very much of your life. This has been a perspective I've had on open-source Java SE for some time: There are precious few people who really care," Phipps said. "I actually don't think most Java developers will be in any way affected by what's going on here in the short term."
Sun's announcement that it would make Java SE open-source comes after a long build-up with a lot of hints by senior executives that the move was in the pipeline. Sun has faced criticism in the past for not opening Java up fast enough, but much of the delay in opening up the code has been due to legal work by Sun to ensure it had the rights to do so, according to the company.
However, Phipps said he thinks that developers working with Java aren't interested in its internals. "What really matters about Java SE to most people who complain about it, is that it isn't in Debian, for example, rather than they want to devote half their life to working on the source code", he said. However, having an open-source process in place around the components that Java coders are using should improve quality, Phipps said. "There are opportunities for people who find bugs to fix them themselves, go into the mailing lists, and submit those bug fixers to the committers of that code."
Phipps explained that this situation mirrored those of other open-source projects, but maintained it was still a benefit for software to be open source. "Take the Linux kernel. Precious few people contribute anything to the Linux kernel, but that doesn't mean that it's not important for it to be open source; it just means that there are not many people whose calling is to be a Linux kernel committer," he said.
The group of coders committing code back to the project is expected to be a fraction of the overall number of Java developers. "I don't know how many people will make up the open-source Java SE community, but it's unlikely to be more than a few hundred," Phipps said. "The number of people who will be interested will be vast, but the number actually cutting code will be quite small."
Jonathan Bennett of Builder UK reported from London.
See more CNET content tagged:
open source, Sun Microsystems Inc., Linux kernel, Java, Java developer
A lot of utilities for their big iron printers are Java.
So your comment is a bit off.
Or a script kiddie who dows not know any better.
Java like C are close to "perfect" languages.
Having said that, only a software engineer will appreciate that statement. ;-)
Java isn't perfect, but its proven itself to be a classic.
There's no real impact on Java developers or users here: in fact Sun has a much more pragmatic reason for pursuing open-source generally. It's just that people would rather not talk about it...
http://www.mwdadvisors.com/blog/2006/08/suns-open-sourcing-of-java-avoid-red.html
Having said that, Sun is correct that taking Java to the "Open Source" world is reall a non-event.
The point Sun is making that many who use Java could care less about the source code.
To the author's point, that a developer can go in to the Java "source" and fix something, is a bad thing. Independent "fixes" means that you lose portability.
- LOL too funny
- by dargon19888 August 17, 2006 12:30 PM PDT
- Seems you're not a real developer.
- Reply to this comment
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- Ooops!
- by dargon19888 August 17, 2006 12:31 PM PDT
- Was replying to the bone head comment of the first poster.
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(12 Comments)Java like C are close to "perfect" languages.
Having said that, only a software engineer will appreciate that statement. ;-)
Java isn't perfect, but its proven itself to be a classic.