Demonstrating a perhaps more aggressive path than anticipated, Sun Microsystems is set to announce the open-sourcing of the core Java platform within 30 to 60 days, Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference on Wednesday morning.
The core platform encompasses the Standard Edition of Java, and it will be offered via an open source format under an OSI (Open Source Initiative)-approved license, likely the same one used for Sun’s open source Solaris OS. Sun officials, including Rich Green, Sun executive vice president for software, have talked about Java being offered via open source in stages later this year and into 2007. Parts of it, such as the Java Enterprise Edition, already are available via open source, with the GlassFish application server constituting the open source enterprise variant.
Unfortunately, this probably won’t speed up the java port much. I am under the impression that the port is on hold until Haiku is closer to completion - allegedly due to some technical limitations in BeOS/Zeta that will hopefully be resolved in Haiku (I got this information secondhand, however).
This will hopefully remove the need for NDA, and official "blessing" of a JVM port before distributing it…but who knows. OSS can mean drastically different things depending on the license terms…
Unfortunately, this probably won’t speed up the java port much. I am under the impression that the port is on hold until Haiku is closer to completion - allegedly due to some technical limitations in BeOS/Zeta that will hopefully be resolved in Haiku (I got this information secondhand, however).
This will hopefully remove the need for NDA, and official "blessing" of a JVM port before distributing it…but who knows. OSS can mean drastically different things depending on the license terms…
Seeing as it is to be an OSI-approved license, NDAs and distribution restrictions should be a thing of the past.
