Sun’s McNealy: Java won’t be open source

Government Computer News ^ | March 24, 2004 | Joab Jackson

[Joe Bonforte]

Despite urging from competitors and open source advocates, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., will not open the source to its Java programming language anytime soon, said Sun CEO Scott McNealy during a news conference at the 2004 FOSE conference.

“We’re trying to understand what problem does it solve that is not already solved,” McNealy said.

Last month Eric Raymond, noted open source programmer and president of the Open Source Initiative advocacy group, posted an open letter to McNealy calling for Sun to make Java open source. “Sun’s insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl,” Raymond wrote.

[Joe Bonforte]

I don't know whether Java should go open source or not, but Sun's got to do something constructive with it.

McNealy can be as dismissive as he likes, but that does not solve Sun's core problems. His main business, bundled hardware/OS, is tanking. His main non-OS software asset, Java, is under attack from Microsoft. Furthermore, the development model he's chosen for it means that it doesn't innovate and adapt as fast as .NET, so it will keep losing relative position.

So he's got to do something. This may be a ploy to force the price of Java up for the company most likely to want to buy it, namely, IBM.

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[Prime Choice]

I used to be an exclusive Solaris admin and user for about a decade (even have a Solaris distro box signed by Bill Joy). But when Sun pulled the rug out from under Solaris x86 users and basically screwed the pooch with their "free" Solaris program, I knew it was time to look elsewhere.

This latest turn of events only shows that I made the right decision in dropping Solaris and moving over to Linux, both on the SPARC and Intel platforms.

[Vince Ferrer]

As an object oriented developer, but not a Java programmer, I feared that Java really would take over. Funny how fortunes can change in ten years. At least it introduced C programmers to object oriented programming.