Sun Microsystems' decision to make Java SE open source won't make any difference to the majority of Java programmers, according to the company's chief open-source officer.
Simon Phipps, speaking at a briefing in London on Tuesday, told ZDNet Australia sister site Builder UK that he has long held the belief that coders working with Java don't care whether the source code is available for their platform.
"I'm not sure it changes very much of your life. This has been a perspective I've had on open-source Java SE for some time: There are precious few people who really care," Phipps said. "I actually don't think most Java developers will be in any way affected by what's going on here in the short term."
Sun's announcement that it would make Java SE open-source comes after a long build-up with a lot of hints by senior executives that the move was in the pipeline. Sun has faced criticism in the past for not opening Java up fast enough, but much of the delay in opening up the code has been due to legal work by Sun to ensure it had the rights to do so, according to the company.
However, Phipps said he thinks that developers working with Java aren't interested in its internals. "What really matters about Java SE to most people who complain about it, is that it isn't in Debian, for example, rather than they want to devote half their life to working on the source code", he said. However, having an open-source process in place around the components that Java coders are using should improve quality, Phipps said. "There are opportunities for people who find bugs to fix them themselves, go into the mailing lists, and submit those bug fixers to the committers of that code."
Phipps explained that this situation mirrored those of other open-source projects, but maintained it was still a benefit for software to be open source. "Take the Linux kernel. Precious few people contribute anything to the Linux kernel, but that doesn't mean that it's not important for it to be open source; it just means that there are not many people whose calling is to be a Linux kernel committer," he said.
The group of coders committing code back to the project is expected to be a fraction of the overall number of Java developers. "I don't know how many people will make up the open-source Java SE community, but it's unlikely to be more than a few hundred," Phipps said. "The number of people who will be interested will be vast, but the number actually cutting code will be quite small."
Jonathan Bennett of Builder UK reported from London.
I have to disagree with this. I am a present evaluating new open source language technologies for our future 5 year plan. Our main concerns are that bugs in our subsystems can be quickly traced and flagged then rectified or at least managed with our customers.
We are also rate highly standards and defacto standards. We are concerned that one commercial group does not dominate those standards like microsoft. Our key concern with java has been the hotspot jit not being open for bug fixes and not being able to be ported to new platforms as we desire. We also see that sun having sole control of this adds risk to the stability of the defacto standard if sun makes poor decisions and goes out of business.
At present we stand at a decision point between the Mono C# project and Java. When you open source the code to the Java Desktop VM we can move forward with Java. Its as simple as that.
As for people not caring that the Linux kernel is open source, well. Thats just silly drinking talk. Perhaps that caught you after a few ports down at the club?
I think Simon, you need to find a new job fast as it sounds like you are even out of step with your own companies new direction let alone the industry.
Move along, nothing to see here until the Java Hotspot Jit is open source.