Sun seeks open-source middle ground
Published: 05 Jul 2004 14:45 BST
Lessig urged Sun to stay away from tinkering with existing open-source licenses to try to address the need for compatibility. "The law has tools -- independent of open-source and free software licenses -- for achieving compatibility without mucking up the free software licenses," he said.
There's pressure on the Java community to work out an accommodation, said Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media. On Wednesday, Novell released version 1.0 of Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net software. In many regards, Mono is a clone of Java, which is software that lets a single program -- written in the Java programming language -- run on several computers.
"There is an elephant in the room -- the fact that on Linux, the Mono project is implementing .Net, not Java. Microsoft does have a foot in the door," O'Reilly said.
If you love it, set it free?
Open-source software may be freely seen, modified and redistributed by anyone. Java, in contrast, is controlled by the Sun-led Java Community Process, and Java products must pass compatibility tests. Developers and groups that want to contribute software changes to Java join the JCP and sign a legal agreement saying they will abide by its procedures.
A key reason why Sun has expressed reluctance to make Java open source is compatibility -- the guarantee that a Java program will run on any Java software foundation. It's not an academic concern: Sun fought for years with Microsoft after the software giant added extensions to Java that broke compatibility. If Java were open source, it also would permit people to create incompatible versions of that software.
At the same time, the open-source community is thriving, and much Java development -- including the Tomcat and Geronimo projects for running Java server software -- is taking place in the open-source realm.
Tomcat and Geronimo fall under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. That group negotiated a way to work with the JCP's standardisation and to pass Java's Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) tests without sacrificing its open-source designs. But Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf said at the debate that he believed it's possible to mix the liberal open-source realm with the stricter compatibility tests.
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