During a press briefing on Tuesday, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, indicated that the company is not inclined to take up IBM's offer to work with Sun to make Java technology open source because of concerns over compatibility.
Schwartz and other Sun executives also revealed details on the company's product plans, including upcoming Linux and Windows versions of the Java Enterprise System, more closely linked security products, and a management console for converting Microsoft Office macros to the Java Desktop System. Sun confirmed plans to offer per citizen pricing for its bundles of Java software to countries in developing nations.
Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging technology, last month sent an email, which was distributed to the press, to Sun vice president Rob Gingell urging Sun to make Java open source. IBM executives said that making at least a portion of Java software open source would help make Java easier to distribute with Linux and would generally promote its usage among developers.
An IBM representative said last week that the company was hoping to meet in the next few weeks with Sun to discuss the matter. Schwartz on Tuesday said that the two companies are in ongoing discussions but have yet to talk over IBM's proposal.
Schwartz said the general public licence (GPL) that governs many open-source applications encourages "forking," or a divergence among the different distributions of the software. He cited the example of Red Hat becoming the de facto distributor of open-source operating system Linux in North America.
"Java is the antithesis of forking. It's about compatibility. That compatibility is of supreme importance," Schwartz said.
He said that Sun does not want to re-create a situation in which there are different and incompatible versions of Java, as is the case with Linux. "We're not going to repeat the mistakes we've seen in the past," he said in an interview with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com on Monday.
Schwartz also noted that people who stick to Sun's licensing terms and maintain compatibility with Sun standards can have access to the Java source code. Changing the licensing to an open-source model would encourage different implementations, he said.
"If IBM wants to allow incompatible implementations, I've seen that movie. It's called 'Microsoft licenses Java from Sun.' It forked the Java community, set us back years, and is now the subject of intense antitrust litigation. I'm not going to let that happen," Schwartz said, who called IBM's request "kind of weird."
By ensuring compatibility through the Java standardisation process, Sun intends to ensure that developers can write a Java application and have it run on many different operating systems and devices, he said.
What's in store for Java
At the press briefing, Sun executives said the company plans to release a Linux edition of its Java Enterprise System in the next 60 days. Sun charges $100 (£55.3) per employee per year to use the product, which is a bundle of Java server software. Windows and HP-UX versions of the Java Enterprise System are expected to be completed by the end of the year, executives said.
The company also is adding in remote diagnostics capabilities that will allow Sun, with a customer's permission, to fix problems over the Internet. Early diagnostic tools are already in version 2 of the Java Enterprise System and will be expanded over the course of the year, said Steven Borcich, executive director of Java enterprise system and security.
Borcich said that in the next 60 days Sun will detail how it plans to meld its current identity management products with the software it gained from its acquisition of Waveset Technologies. Ultimately, the identity management software will be integrated with Sun's N1 Grid technology to allow companies to provision resources, such as bandwidth or processing capacity, based on groups of people within companies, he said.
By the end of the year, Sun will release enterprise and standard editions of the Java Application Server 8, server software that is a component of the Java Enterprise System. Version 8 uses the Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4 specification, which allows companies to run Web services applications.
In April, Sun will begin an early evaluation process for its Java Studio Creator product, a Java programming tool aimed at rapid creation of Web applications.
Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for Java Web services and tools, said that Sun has had some discussion with the newly formed board of Eclipse about the open-source development project's work with the Java Tools Community. He said that Sun wants to better understand Eclipse's goals and is waiting to name an executive director before renewing any discussion regarding Sun's participation in Eclipse.
Talkback
That's an stupid excuse. Is apache, mozilla, kde, gnome or any other big project forked? No they are not. Why should JAVA be forked over Linux? M$ did fork java on pourpose for commercial reasons but Linux people don't have to. It is a plain excuse to avoid saying the truth. They wanna use the community efford without giving back to it.
Too true mr Pertinez.... There also seems to be a common error with regards to Linux which spans from the perception that the many "distributions" that use the "Linux Kernel" are Linux itself. In the real world Linux is not forked. It is however an adequate tool employed by the many distributions building Linux based solutions. In this manner they are each free to design the heirarchies they choose to employ in an interaction with the kernel.
Too true mr Pertinez.... There also seems to be a common error with regards to Linux which spans from the perception that the many "distributions" that use the "Linux Kernel" are Linux itself. In the real world Linux is not forked. It is however an adequate tool employed by the many distributions building Linux based solutions. In this manner they are each free to design the heirarchies they choose to employ in an interaction with the kernel.
Ues Eduard is right.
Why python, php etc are not forked then?
And they are still cross platform
Yeah, right. Incompatible versions. Come on Sun. We are stuck utilizing an older variation of Java (1.3.1_02) as any deviation from this version, including 1.3.1_01 and 1.3.1_03 will break our applications. So much for the Java pipe dream.
It doesn't matter. Who needs Java, anyway?
We already have Perl, Python, C/C++.
GPL'ing software doesn't cause it to fork.
As mentioned elsewhere, there are many testaments to the successful use of an "Open Source" development method: Ruby, Python, PHP, Linux etc.
Sun is just posturing, and the development of Java will suffer for it - languages such as Python are already eating away at Java's traditional piece of the cake.
I agree with Mr.Martin LaMonica, it is preety sure that taking Java open source would spoil its development by creating incompatible versions n i would like to request all the Developer that they should force the Open Source Code Community not to open source any Software, rather they should develop products which are free to use but it should be under a SPECIFIC FIRM
I agree that these other major projects are not forked, but consider the current situation with Microsoft trying to scuttle Java. The currently are not allowed to make their own, non-standard version of it, but if it were open sourced I think that they would be free to do so and to create their own MS biased version and to ship it with Windows and disrupt the whole Java market once again.