Five years of open-source Java: Freedom isn't (quite) free

Open-source Java: Part One Open source Java has a long and torrid history, rife with corporate rivalry, very public fallings-out, and ideological misgivings. But has all the effort and rumpus that went into creating an officially sanctioned open JDK been worth it?

Java co-creator James Gosling certainly thinks so - although he didn't seem entirely open to the idea in the early days.

Gosling told The Reg that putting Java under the GPL has helped unify what was a fractured community while making the code freely available has helped uptake from a grassroots up.

"In general, I'd say that it's worked out extraordinarily well," Gosling tells The Reg. "Java is far stronger today than I would have predicted two years ago."

It was 13 November 2006 when Sun Microsystems bowed to sustained and long-running pressure and finally open-sourced Java under a license everybody could agree on. What did that mean?

Sun released the Java HotSpot virtual machine and compiler as free software under the GPL license; the following year Sun released the source code of the Class library under the same license.

Open-source Java: Part Two

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Java's 'Steve Jobs' moment in 2012?

OpenJDK: Right ideas, wrong timing

Five years after Sun Microsystems finally released Java under the GPL, Oracle has been pushing hard on the OpenJDK.

The OpenJDK project followed shortly after Sun’s open-sourcing of Java in November 2005; it’s both a free-and-open-source implementation of Java Standard Edition (Java SE).

The project has seen a fresh lease of life under Oracle, Sun's buyer, who has tempted IBM away from the Apache Software Foundation’s Harmony Java SE project and who also recruited Apple to OpenJDK. OpenJDK also has a new set of governance rules, albeit rules that hand Oracle and IBM a duopoly over ultimate control of the project and, therefore, the roadmap.

But five years after Sun let Java go, what’s the state of the platform and technology?

Open-source Java: Part Three

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Time up for Oracle's HTML5 killer?

Sun Microsystems in 2007 announced a re-imagining of GUI platform Swing with JavaFX. Swing, Sun said, had reached an architectural dead-end and need a reboot to compete on modern, Rich Internet Application (RIA) platforms.

As Sun pitched JavaFX, Adobe brought out Flex (which is based on its Flash Player plug-in) and Microsoft countered with Silverlight.

It's unfortunate that just as JavaFX 2.0 is being released, those who helped inspire it are going HTML5. Meanwhile, almost nobody uses the phrase "RIA" anymore.

Microsoft has all but sidelined Silverlight while the bell of uncertainty is tolling for Flex with Adobe's recent announcement that it is floating the Flex SDK out to the community. Adobe insists it is still behind the Flex SDK, but it seems more like a loving form of euthanasia. Adobe, meanwhile, has decided to stop development of Flash Player for mobile.

The culprit in both cases is HTML5, the next version of the web mark-up protocol that is killing closed and proprietary media stacks.

Is JavaFX - the subject of our third and final look at Java five years after Sun released it under a GPL licence - in the wrong place at the wrong time? Has it already lost and doesn't know it? Maybe not: Microsoft may have had Windows to leverage Silverlight but Adobe was the real leader thanks the the dominance of Flash and Adobe's surprise change of direction could make way for new, standards-based development tools - if Oracle can get serious on JavaFX. Delivering on its promise to open-source JavaFX might also help.

Above is just background....

Recently in the Oracle vs Google Lawsuit:

Space-cadet Schwartz blows chunks out of Oracle's Java suit

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Thanks Jonathan. Come back any time

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in CIO, 27th April 2012 15:32 GMT

Analysis Google unveiled its secret weapon against Oracle this week: Jonathan Schwartz.

The first third of the IP trial, which is expected to last eight weeks, deals with copyright. Patents and trademark claims come next. This week it was Google's turn to defend itself against Oracle's copyright infringement claims, and Schwartz was the star turn. Schwartz joined Sun in 1996 and 10 years later succeeded Scott McNealy as Sun CEO. It was Schwartz who delivered the company to Oracle in 2009. All of which means he was in charge of the IP that's the subject of this case for much of the time Android was being developed, and when it was launched in late 2007.

Schwartz was on the stand for less than an hour – but managed to trample Gruffalo-sized footprints in Oracle's case.

"We didn't think they [Google] were doing anything wrong," Schwartz affirmed. He also attested that at no time during his tenure did Sun "consider APIs proprietary or protected". An Oracle attorney asked Schwartz if he had been fired by Oracle when the deal was completed in 2010. Ever quick on his feet, Schwartz replied that "They already had a CEO".

Schwartz really couldn't say anything else. One of Google's strongest arguments is that for 18 months after Google unveiled Android, Sun twiddled its thumbs and did nothing. In fact it cooed quite a lot about a "Participation Economy". Only after Ellison's Oracle acquired Sun's IP did the war drums begin.

Which doesn't mean Sun doesn't have a strong claim on its IP case. Copyright claims do not have to be asserted continuously, as trademarks do. But if the jury concludes that Sun was relaxed about how its IP was used, it may limit the damages to a figure far lower than what Oracle wants. (That figure has already been halved).

When Android was launched, Schwartz wished them well in a blog post title beginning "Congratulations Google", calling it "an incredible day".

He continued: "Needless to say, Google and the Open Handset Alliance just strapped another set of rockets to the community's momentum – and to the vision defining opportunity across our (and other) planets."

Vision defining opportunity. Rockets. Planets. We so miss the space cadet.

(Last July, Oracle deleted Schwartz's old CEO blog where these gems appeared).

Oracle rapidly tried to repair the damage Schwartz had done by bringing Scott McNealy, Sun co-founder and CEO from 1984 to 2006, to the stand. McNealy explained that Sun still thought its IP to be immensely valuable, but didn't want to push too hard. On the stand, Schwartz had rationalised his strategy like this: "We didn’t like it, but we weren’t going to stop it by complaining about it." McNealy clarified that "Open source or open standards doesn't mean 'Let's throw it over the transom. That's a big difference."

Sun's business plan for open-source software in the 2000s

Schwartz's strategy was to give away the software assets – like Java – in order to drive interest in Sun's high-margin computer hardware. It was accompanied by much hippy-happy-talk: advertising campaigns proclaimed the 'Participation Age'.

This was described as a "Underpants Gnomes strategy" by one pundit and more devastatingly by Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, in one particular post in 2006.

"The more Sun 'wins', the more money it loses. Ponytail Boy has just turned a non-performing asset into a friggin boat anchor," wrote Lyons/FakeSteve. "Why you’ve just turned the entire field of economics on its head! Wow! Did they teach you this at McKinsey?

"Jonathan, this is a hard truth but you have to swallow it: If you’ve got something that for whatever reason nobody is willing to pay you money for, that’s the world’s way of telling you to go do something else. "

If Google needs to jolt the jury into consciousness after all the highly technical talk and complex legal arguments about IP, this would should do the trick admirably. We'll be disappointed if it isn't entered into the docket.

"We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open-sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share," McNealy agreed in 2010, in a fascinating interview with El Reg.

Now you can see why the judge tried so hard to get the sides to agree – and stop the show coming to court. ®

And now:

Jury retires for weekend in deadlock in Oracle-v-Google verdict

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The jury in the trial between Oracle and Google over alleged copyright infringement of Java in the Android operating system has retired for the weekend after stalling on a single point of law.

The jury of seven women and five men began mulling the issue on Tuesday and have now reported that a verdict has been reached on three out of the four charges in the trial, but that they're stuck on the last one.

They appear to be clear on the question of APIs being covered by copyright, but are deadlocked on the issue of whether or not Google simply copied Java code, or if it added enough utility to invoke fair use.

"If there is hope for reaching a verdict on all the questions, we should take advantage of that hope and spend one more day deliberating," US District Judge William Alsup told the jury, the San Jose Mercury News reports. "So what I'm going to ask you to do is do exactly that."

Judge Alsup indicated that he would be willing to accept a partial verdict in the case, but would much rather have the jury agree on all charges.

There is no end to all of this crapola...

McNealy to Ellison: How to duck death by open source

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Ex-Sun boss talks code, community, and underpants

Gavin Clarke in San Francisco •

7th December 2010 01:30 GMT

Money from underpants

It couldn't have come at a worse time. Southeastern needed revenue model Plan B at a time when Sun's high-end Solaris server sales dried up in late 2008 as the economy went south. Everybody was suffering, but Sun hadn't recovered from the 2001 crash. Southeastern had no use for a software strategy founded on a theory and that was failing to deliver.

Today, Sun's formerly failing open source software is in Ellison's hands, and Ellison has made it pretty damn clear that open source is there to serve his goal of profit, and not some exercise in corporate self-indulgence. The marching orders are clear: Oracle, not the community, owns Sun's open source projects, therefore Oracle and not the community will run them. Sun's open-source software contains Sun IP that Oracle now owns, so Sun's IP will serve Oracle's greater business interests. Additional time and money spent by Oracle on Sun open source will deliver a return on investment to, you got it, Oracle.

Sun's business plan for open source software in the 2000s

Oracle has trademark ownership, too, so good luck building that level of brand recognition for your MySQL and OpenOffice splinter.

Oracle's strategy is alienating it from those who'd bathed in Sun's collegiate ways.

Is there, then, a teachable moment here? A moment that McNealy can impart to Ellison, given that McNealy is a career-long fan of marrying open source with commerce since he picked up BSD and ran with it in SunOS, and then teamed up with Unix's then-owner AT&T to sink SunOS into Unix System V Release 4 in 1990?

McNealy, after all, likes to boast how Sun donated an "enormous" amount of its R&D to the community, and he identifies Sun as the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix. Any lessons the old dog of open systems can teach the brash database king?

Sure, McNealy tells us: put your shareholders first.

Wait — what? That's the language of Ellison!

"We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share," McNealy said. "You gotta take care of your shareholders or you end up very vulnerable like we got. We were a wonderful acquisition — we got stolen for a song at the bottom of the Dow."

"That's the message," McNealy tells us. "You gotta strike a proper balance between sharing and building the community and then monetizing the work that you do... I think we got the donate part right, I don't think we got the monetize part right.'

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