“The Apache Software Foundation concludes that that JCP is not an open specification process – that Java specifications are proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses; that the commercial concerns of a single entity, Oracle, will continue to seriously interfere with and bias the transparent governance of the ecosystem; that it is impossible to distribute independent implementations of JSRs under open source licenses such that users are protected from IP litigation by expert group members or the spec lead; and finally, the EC is unwilling or unable to assert the basic power of their role in the JCP governance process.”
I think we all saw this coming. I’m amazed this conclusion hadn’t been arrived at officially earlier.
So that makes 2 members (Tim Peierls being the other) to resign from the committee. Good for them for sticking up for what they believe.
It doesn’t pay in the long run. Oracle is a big company, a very big company, with big pockets and lots of developers.
But how wise is it to diss so many developers? Sure, it won’t happen overnight, but the Apache Foundation really is the driving force behind Java now. Java started as a tool to make portable desktop apps and web applets, and was heavily promoted by Sun. That FAILED COMPLETELY. In the desktop market or on the web, Java is barely there. Sure, there are many desktop Java apps, but they usually are not the reference for their domain.
Java was kept alive by the enterprise market – and here Apache stepped up and delivered the goods.
A lot of developers will be pissed by this (this and the Google lawsuit fiasco) and they will start searching for alternatives.
Cobol, here comes Java
Edited 2010-12-09 21:14 UTC
Very bad for java and the java ecosystem.
Now the real question is: what real alternatives are out there?
No .net is not an alternative, it is a technology encumbered by patents, copyrights, greedy corporations and so on.
What the opensource world has to effectively replace java and the jvm?
llvm?
Hard to say, but fast implementation of VMs and programming languages and APIs is one of the strong points of OSS.
Once the trend moves towards something, that will bubble up, be it Python 3, Parrot, LLVM, V8 or something like that.
I think no one knows right now what’s beyond Java, we will found out in 2-3 years I think.
Ruby, PHP, Python
“NEXT! No more SOAP for you!”
Stupid .NET can’t consume Restful API services.
It has to use WSDL via SOAP… blah.
You could not be more inaccurate.
A simple web search will land you in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/cc950529.aspx where MS will even provide samples for consuming RESTful services.
I believe you were talking about old (.Net 2.0) Web Services stack, which has now been replaced by WCF.
Edited 2010-12-10 04:39 UTC
Why would this matter if you are using .NET? the patents are owned by microsoft so there is no danger when using their product, will be a concern if you are using mono.
As for patents, the java specification has them to. Look at the license yourself http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/jcopyright.d…
Apparently IBM, Oracle and Borland aren’t greedy corps? (they are all on various Java committees).
Netbeans and Spring Framework is still very poplular among developers.
(Spring Framework is not controlled by Oracle.)
And Hadoop has become hot technology.
(controlled by Yahoo)
Java 7 will come out next year and is said to finally squash the speed myth too with the addition of multicore programming support.
Also Java is very popular in the mobile app markets.
I dont think Apache is doing this out of principle. It wont cut off it’s nose to spite the face.
It’s all about licensing/redistribution legalities.
“that it is impossible to distribute independent implementations of JSRs under open source licenses such that users are protected from IP litigation “
For those of us who don’t know English idioms, what do you mean?
To cut ones nose of to spite ones face means that somebody is so unwilling to admit that they are wrong, that they will harm themselves, just to try prove that they were right. It is the holding of a position solely based upon the notion that it is the opposite of what someone else says, rather than based on merit or truth.
In this case the ASF would not reject JCP just because they have a point to prove with their actions, but that because they actually gave it a fair chance and considered all possibilities before coming to their conclusion.
Got it. Thanks!
Never really liked Java in the first place. The sooner it’s dead the better. How I would love for everyone to wake up and say – hey Ada is a serious programming language, why don’t we put time and effort into it.
And Lisp for that matter puts C++/Java etc… to shame for speed of implementation.
Instead of focusing on semantics the language is pretty basic syntactically deriving its power from functions.
I think python has enough clout that it could be a good replacement for Java. And its not encumbered by any corporation.
Pity that is does not run half as fast.
Java did not run “fast” until relatively recently. The same things that helped make Java faster could be done for Python. A JIT, native-code compiler for Python, for instance, would go a long way toward making it “fast”.
Edited 2010-12-10 13:15 UTC
I know,
http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/
But this is still not standard Python (yet).