For What It's Worth
Posted 03:43 PM    

Is it just me, or is everyone still exhausted from JavaOne? It seems that after all the new product releases, announcements, demos, BOFs, sessions, and parties, no one has had much energy to get on with anything. But maybe everyone's already busy getting ready for next year's conference.

Conferences are always good for meeting old acquaintances, and while we were there hanging around the Moscone Center, we talked briefly with Simon Phipps, formerly the Chief Technology Evangelist for Sun Microsystems. Simon is in the process of getting a new title and preparing to focus on Sun's open source efforts, including OpenSolaris and the Glassfish Project, which is an arena for developers who want to participate in the open source group that's developing the latest version of Sun's Java System Application Server PE 9.0. Simon's idea of how open source will expand the Java market for everyone reflected what Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and COO, said in his keynote the first day of the conference. Schwartz talked about the social utility of free software—how it's good for business, brings more participants into the economy, and creates more opportunities for software vendors.

"Driving compatibility is fundamental to driving the community, and the community is key if you want to see value," Schwartz said in his keynote. "Companies like eBay, Google, and Amazon have figured this out." He said that Sun's open implementation of Java—including the application server source code, integrated tools, and use of the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)—is good for business. The code distribution will include the integrated NetBeans IDE code, JEE 5 (remember—there's no "2" anymore), and JBI (JSR 208) code. Schwartz said that there's no downside to FOSS (free, open source software) and that the developer community should assume this is the first step of many.

So how's that going to happen? The CDDL license is OSI approved and contains indemnification and patent protection. Still, there has been a lot of chatter on various developer sites since JavaOne about what the license means for the folks who contribute to Glassfish and what Sun's plans are. Jim Driscoll is the manager of the project, and he's got a blog that's been chewing on this issue. TheServerSide also has been running a thread, and there are lots of other discussions and articles if you're interested.

The issues focus on copyright, license, and patent rules and restrictions, and how these would be applied to the code written and what Sun could or couldn't do as time goes on. It's an interesting problem, not the least because it concerns Sun, which seems to need to step more carefully than other companies. If Sun behaves too aggressively, then it's basically going after its business partners—a tricky proposition. However, in this case, as one contributor said, "If using MySQL and Linux doesn't scare you, then using Sun's app server shouldn't scare you either."