Christopher Blizzard » Java http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog I love you. Thu, 26 May 2011 20:29:33 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 the opportunity costs of java’s license http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2006/03/the-opportunity-costs-of-javas-license/ http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2006/03/the-opportunity-costs-of-javas-license/#comments Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:31:38 +0000 Christopher Blizzard http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=190 Continue reading →]]> Java’s not open source. Everyone knows it. Sun thinks the current situation is good enough. Scott Dietzen (ex-CTO of BEA) doesn’t think so. Peter Yared doesn’t think so. So instead of just giving reasons of why they should do it, let’s instead talk about the cost of them not doing it. I want to talk about the opportunity costs of them not open sourcing Java. Those things that are clearly measurable as things that were missed because Java wasn’t open source. Here’s the stuff that I know of off the top of my head:

  • The rise of the “LAMP” stack. As Peter points out (and as I have many times) that could have been “Java” instead of “PHP and Perl.” But it’s not.
  • Mono on the desktop. .NET is an incremental improvement of Java. Mono is a copy of the .NET stack. It’s become the basis for a bunch of really exciting desktop apps in Linux. While “this app is written in Mono!” isn’t a great selling point, it has made a difference to a bunch of developers and is shipped by default in just about every major Linux distribution which means “Mono everywhere” is a reality. Java isn’t. It will never be the default for desktop apps on Linux, as much as we would love it to be.
  • A huge number of VMs and class libraries. IBM. BEA. Classpath. Kaffe. gcj. Harmony. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux we include three different virtual machines. Why? Because they are all incompatible with various applications. Write once, run anywhere? It’s a lie, guys. Tests don’t hold a candle to a single source base. Just ask the guys in the Sun X server group.
  • Eclipse. Wait, what you say? Isn’t eclipse written in Java? Isn’t that a success for Java? Kind of. In some ways Eclipse is even more important than Java. It’s a great framework and a great development environment. It makes using Java productive. From what I hear from friends who develop in Eclipse and Visual C++ from Microsoft, Eclipse kicks the crap out of it. We could be kicking ass with it. But it’s based on non-free software. Which means it’s tainted and the right people won’t get behind it. The license holds Eclipse back.
  • Mozilla. I’m sure that if we had an open source Java that ran on as many platforms as Gecko does that you would be able to write extensions in Java. But you can’t right now. Instead you’re using JavaScript and Top Men are hacking on JavaScript 2. Once again, a missed opportunity.
  • More Mozilla – The Plug-in Prison. Right now if you want to use Java in the browser (as opposed to as an extension) it’s stuck in the plugin prison. We could have been writing code to control web content in Java. But we’re not.

And that’s just off my head. Comments are on on this post. If you can think of something else, go ahead and post!

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