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Yeah. It didn't do that for the past 10 years, but now, this is gonna surely change everything!

Well, Java is very prominent on the server...

Clearly Java isn't any good. That's why it's so hard to find a job as a Java developers and that's why being a Java developer pays so poorly.

Obviously I'm being sarcastic.

"""
ah brilliant, can't wait for the wave of updates from the community, Java is gonna kick some serious ass.
"""

Don't be overly optimistic. I thought the same thing when Netscape open sourced their code.

The problem is that you can't dump a huge, complicated code base on the community and expect them to just take off running.

The Mozilla guys wasted a year trying to understand the code base before deciding to start from scratch on a lot of it. It took loooooooooong years to get to Mozilla 1.0, during which time they had actually *regressed* from the usability of the 4.x code base. And MS took advantage of that time to reduce the Netscape market share from 70+% to as close to naught as makes no odds. It's *really* hard to recover from that.

Nowadays, we cheer when we think FF might have reached about 10%-15% market share again.

Don't expect open-sourcing to be a panacea. Especially considering that the Java Community Process or whatever they call it was already *pretty* open, even if the code was not open source.

Edited 2007-05-09 19:41

I agree with you, but I'm not so pessimistic. I have looked at Java library's source code, and it is extremely clean and well-written.

Open Source is not a verb:

Sigh. I hate language purists. Maybe someone ought to tell them that the contemporary English vocabulary consists largely of French, Latin, and other non-English words. Less than 25% comes from 'original' old-English.

Edited 2007-05-09 11:03

Couldn't agree more. It's one of my pet hates. The word "Google" is now a verb in the same way.

It's one of my pet hates.

Er, "hate" is a verb, not a noun. "Hatred" is the noun form.

Moral: English changes, like it or not. Also, don't do the thing you're complaining about as you're complaining about it, it just shows that you're wrong to complain about it in the first place.

Could I get that again? And in slow motion this time?

Anyway... there is a clear relationship between nouns and verbs so if one was truly a "language purist" one would appreciate the mechanics of languages. Driver=noun, driving=verb. The driver is driving. Did the verb stem from the noun or opposite. What was it called before it was called 'driving'? Did people object about a driver beaing used as a noun. I'm using google therefore I am googling. Seems perfectly acceptable to me. One could perhaps call a person using a seek engine for a googler?

Moral: English changes, like it or not. Also, don't do the thing you're complaining about as you're complaining about it, it just shows that you're wrong to complain about it in the first place.

Actually, I was agreeing with Thom. I dislike language purists.

Ah, so you're into "axe grinding", well, could Americans stop saying, "Xerox'ing", or "Klenex" and many others?

Sorry, when a business/organisation/product becomes the defacto standard for a certain thing, it becomes a verb; You don't 'search' anymore, you Google, Google is now the defacto standard, the Microsoft of the search world.

Talk about mountains out of mole hills.

Thom, I think that you will find that it is not hard to write in English and have no words that do not come from Old English or at least words with Germanic roots*. Your thoughts are true in some ways, but not always. The thing with English is that there are often two words for any bit of it. This then makes folks think that the "Latin/French" words have taken over. Well, as you can see, they have not.

* the bug bear being that old Norse roots often look like Old English ones.

However, there you go, a readable paragraph with minimal Latinate influence.

I disagree.

English as we know it right now is a mix of several languages: Old English, scotch, irish, and Germanic roots mainly; but there are a lot of inheritance from another languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_of_internationa...

While we're at the pedantry-fest, can I just point out that Scotch refers to a drink, or a boiled egg wrapped in sausage-meat and breadcrumbs considered a delicacy in some proletarian locales. In any other instance, it's 'Scots' if you please!

Props from heart-attack country

> I disagree.

Look up the words I used in my first paragraph. I think you'll find that none are anything appart from of Germanic origins, save the words "French*" and "Latin".

* Though technically the word "France" and the word "French" come from the "Franks" who were a Germanic tribe.

> English as we know it right now is a mix of several
> languages: Old English, scotch, irish, and Germanic
> roots mainly; but there are a lot of inheritance
> from another languages:

No, you are wrong. Old English consisted of a number of dialects. The dialects were spread over large areas. Northumbrian, Kentish, West Saxon and Mercian. The dialect areas still exist even till today in England. Though England has a nasty habbit of having a different dialect every 25 miles or so.

There is no such langusge as "Scotch". There are three languages in Modern Scotland. Scots Gaelic, Scots and English. Both Scots and English are related to Old English directly. Scots Gaelic is a dialect or Irish Gaelic. Most of "Scots" dialect is pretty much English, but it uses a few hundred distinctly Scots words and a very different overall pronounciation. But if you've ever heard a Geordie speak (Newcastle, UK) it's not too dissimilar overall.

Irish Gaelic/Scots Gaelic are both Celtic languages. Welsh is also another language we have here. You can count the number of Celtic loan words on two hands.

Old English is a Germanic language. There is a language called Frisian that is spoken in costal reagions of Holland, NW Germany and S Denmark that is directly related to Old English. It's sort of the old folks we left behind, so to speak.

Norse greatly influenced English, Norse being another Germanic dialect.

Latin and French were very late in the game. Much of the French in English is actually from a Northern dialect which was quite different to what we would now call French. We somtimes borrow a word twice from French, hence Waranty (Norman French) and Guarantee (Central French.)

So, um, no, I was correct. I know what I am talking about ;-) Off topic as it is (sorry)

Hey, I did not know that the old English talked in monosyllables, like the Epsilons in Brave New World ;-)

Seriously, that really hints that English is far apart from latin; it is very, very hard to compose a meaningful sentence in Spanish or French using only monosyllables.

Honestly, I haven't thought that my comment would spur such a discussion, with some pretty interesting comments too.

Although I don't necessarily share the view of that newsforge poster, I have to admit that now that I have given it a bit more thought, I do find an "open source" verb strange in that way that it's composed of two words. I can't recall similar verbs in English, although it's 2 AM here, I might be missing something.

Anyway, if I looked at "Sun Open Sources Java" without knowing the context, I'd probably have a hard time figuring the message it conveys. Celestial body does some strange thing regarding opening/source to an island, eh? Looks more like a collection of random words ;-)

well maybe open source wasn't a verb... languages are constantly changing and developing through common usage. If your use of the language clearly communicates your message then it has succeeded in its primary function. Considering the international effects of the internet and the popularity of sms messaging i'd say the language purists are going to be in for a bit of a bumpy ride as it seems to me that languages are changing more rapidly now (on a global scale) than ever.

Once upon a time, neither were host, fool, switch and many others. Verbification happens. Just as we can outsource something, we can open source something.

More on topic: I'm pretty curious to see what happens with GCJ, Kaffe and others now. Will they fold?continue on their own way? Appropriate bits and pieces (seems like that could be harder than at first glance), appropriate Sun's stuff wholesale? Harmony of course can't do the last two. Wonder if that had anything to do with Sun's choice of license.

OTish again. Harmony is an Open Source java, yet can't use (if they wish to retain the same Apache license throughout their codebase anyway) Sun's GPLd stuff. Could we more properly say that Sun Free Softwared Java? (verbifying again)

Edited 2007-05-09 12:30 UTC

Could we more properly say that Sun Free Softwared Java? (verbifying again)

They Free Softwared it after being heavily Stallmanned for years. ;}

I can only speak for Kaffe (since I run the project) - it's going to continue on. The people on the mailing list want it to continue on. It's still probably the easiest virtual machine with a JIT to port to exotic platforms.

And Dalibor Topic (the top Kaffe developer) is only the OpenJDK governance board now! :-)

Of course it's a verb, if it's used as a verb. Good or bad, that's for history to say.
I remember when I was young that the word "kodak" was sometimes used as a verb - as in "to kodak something".
History wasn't too kind on that one; let's see what it has to say about "out-sorce" and "open-source".

Remember the old saying: "There is no noun that cannot be verbed"

WT*? Is this an English grammar site? I thought I was here to read tech news.

Yeah. I thought that article was useless filler when I read it last year and my thoughts on that matter haven't changed.

"Open-source" makes a very handy transitive verb, thank-you-very-much. It improves the clarity and conciseness of the language. And if overly-pedantic grammar experts don't like it then they can email me and I will tell them in private just what they can do with their silly complaints. ;-)

flash gaining against adobe? you do know who now owns flash right?

Sorry, it was a grammatical error (should have picked up in proof reading).
Corrected now.

Thanks
Laurence

actually in the eweek article above

"the systems company and Java giant also announced a new competitor to Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight,"

so guess they can finally get rid of the aged applets and get something better.

With Java 6 browsers still grinds to a complete halt for 10-20 seconds to load an applet (3Ghz 1G ram PC). There is precisely 0% chance of it ever competing with Flash online until a JRE is recoded from the ground up to start up instantly and install seamlessly.

Unfortunately, yes. When running, it is much faster than flash, but startup is still a problem. As is cleanup: the plugin remains in memory, until the browser is closed.

However, Java has WebStart since 1.4, which is much better and cleaner than applets.

Edited 2007-05-09 11:58

Isn't this rather a problem of the plugin?

If it would start the JRE out-of-process, the browser could just reserve the necessary space on the page and keep on rendering the rest.

In fact that's how Konqueror handles Java applets.

I certainly think it will regain some lost ground. We might even see some new innovations by bright young minds on the Linux platform as well.

As long as they don't procrastinate in regards to merging contributors contributions to the project - I don't see any forks happening. But that is my one fear; if they make access and contributions difficult, a group will simply peal off, and develop a project without layers upon layers of bureaucracy - and both projects will be weaker.

Hence the reason I'm not particular excited about the idea of having multiple versions of OpenSolaris - you're just asking for trouble in the long run as each diverge off in different directions resulting in incompatibilities.

There already are a few JVMs.
We've got Sun's, IBM, GNU Classpath, GCJ, and Apache Harmony. Sun's will still be the standard, so we don't have too much to worry about

Yes, but the only one that works worth $(%@ is the sun one. Most (and by most I mean all.. I am just covering for some exceptions that I probably dont know about) of the open source ones that exist currently (and before sun open sourced theirs) are pretty much garbage.

Which is wierd, considering that Apple's proprietary, closed-source JVM runs much more natively and fast (on OS X), in fact, faster than Sun's own JVM on Windows or Linux.

Why can't the open-source JVMs work just as well on Linux?

I'm hoping that this doesn't turn out like Mozilla's XUL architecture, which, despite being open source for most of the early 2000s, has gotten regressively slow with each new release of Firefox, in comparison to closed-source browsers like Opera and IE.

I hope not. But if they can solve the startup issue in the open source version they can then impliment that fix in the original.

I've studied SUN announcements very carefuly. That means that anyone can take JDK source code, change it, recompile and distribute under GPL v2. Who would want to use those derivates, that is another matter.

Mayby some Linux distributions would choose to link JDK with different or newer version of some library, or so.

yup its now just as easy to make GUI, with new features built into netbeans and tons of plugins for eclipse.

The latest version of Netbeans is brilliant. Before it was an absolute pain for anyone used to MS style GUI creation. Now you just drag & drop components and matisse magically takes care of all the container stuff for you but you still get all the power of Swing. Components automatically align and space themselves removing a lot of drudgery of VB style drag & drop.

I would argue that using Matisse under NetBeans is better than anything I've used with Visual Studio for creating GUIs. NetBeans is open-source as well.

I have delivered Swing business desktop application last year. Customers use it on Windows with native look and feel. Most of them believe that it is a native application.

Some people develop Swing applications that load a number of plugins at startup, depending of the configuration written in conf. files. Those can take long to load.

Java 6 contains some very important improvements to the three areas you have mentioned. If you are developing a desktop application, make sure your clients are running it on Java 6.

Regarding startup time, Java 6 offers instantaneous splash screen (before Swing even loads), which should decrease the perceived startup time.

In addition, the Hotspot client VM has received important improvement in Java 6, which should increase operational speed.

Java 6 also improved the fidelity of the native themes for Windows and GTK. They make use of the native theme engine and should be practically indistinguishable from native applications.

Yes! The web was intended to be an open platform with open standards. Accessability and access for all should be the standard. All operating systems should be welcome and easily able to implement the standards of the web. Proprietary, closed plugins need to fade away. I, too, hope that JavaFX succeeds. I am a developer and I am going to jump all over this. It is especially important that it be easy for developers to use. This will greatly increase the possibilty of market penetration. As I've said before, Sun is rising!

Why that? You can still produce proprietary products with GPL'ed Java. Just like you can create proprietary products with C# in monodevelop. Or GPL'ed products with C# using Visual Studio and Microsofts .Net "framework".

Derivitive works as in if I create a programming language from the source code of java and call it, say, Lava.. Then I would have to open source THAT.

A program completly unrelated written in the java language is NOT a derivitive work of an open source java.

By your logic anything compiled/written with gcc/g++ c/c++ would have to be open source.

Edited 2007-05-09 16:49

Using a compiler to compile your code IS NOT a derivative work. Even linking in GPL libraries (thus the LGPL) is not a derivative work. So these arguments are specious. You can create GPL works with C#, and you will be able to create closed-source products with java. You just cannot create a closed-source _VERSION_ of java (as the previous poster mentioned). The good news, is since C# is an open standard (ISO), you can produce an open-source version of the C# language, and thus we have Mono. Nevertheless, you can most certainly create a closed-source Mono project if you want, but obviously most would use C# to create closed-source projects.

As an example of an excellent open-source C# application, you just have to look at SharpDevelop. It is an excellent GPL C# application.

(genuine question..)

But, if the Java standard classes are GPL'd, and my Java application uses these standard classes, doesn't my application have to be GPL'd?

Incorrect. You can create proprietary products with mono. It is only the IDE which is GPL.

GCC is GPL'ed too but that doesn't mean applications compiled with GCC becomes GPL. You can create proprietary products using the basic GNU libraries.

You can also create proprietary products with GPL'ed Java. You can claim otherwise as you want to but Sun and FSF have already made clear that it doesn't touch derivative works because of an exception clause (not unlike the way GPL is used for fonts). Heck, you can create proprietary products using GNU Classpath because of that.

Look for 'Classpath exception' on your favourite search engine. It is a clause in JDK license that enables you to mix class libraries that come with JDK with your own proprietary code.

It was the first thing I checked when I heard that J2SE is going to be distributed under GPL.

Actually, that's false. If you modified the Runtime, then you would have to release the modified runtime as GPL, but anything you write with it is not GPL. Any linking to the runtime is done exactly then, at runtime.

Why that?

Hatred for the GPL can lead to funny decisions...