I noticed that bug RT-3308: Media Support for Linux and Solaris was Resolved as Fixed a few days ago. The media support (which is mostly native code) is the major portability trouble in JavaFX, it’s the piece that was missing for Linux and Solaris. The bug was also marked as a Release Driver for v1.5.

Too bad that nightlies are not available to the public, as the JavaFX Runtime project is still closed. But in a few weeks, when 1.5 is released with these ports and other major features like the native component package, some people will have to find other reasons to discredit JavaFX.

But as we mention Linux and closed development, let me say that I expect Sun to put the complete runtime into an open source license, now at JavaOne’09 and not one day later. I was reviewing Sun’s statements on that issue and the most recent and official position comes from the FAQ, which is pretty disheartening – it basically promises that the pieces already open will continue to be open; for the rest, “Sun is committed to delivering enhancements to the JavaFX platform and to this end will continue internal development and reconcile key elements with the open source builds, with future releases of the JavaFX platform.” That doesn’t look any good… Rich Green stated very clearly in JavaOne’07 that “We plan to open-source all of JavaFX as we work through the program”, and Jeet Kaul also confirmed a few months ago that “We will put the core runtime out in the open over time.” Either the FAQ needs to be fixed, or Sun is lying to us big time. Hopefully that’s not the case, and Sun won’t be stupid enough to use some excuse to only fulfill the open source promise in 2010 or 2011, when it will be too late. Sun already screwed up by not opening the JDK years before; don’t do it again. Earth to Sun: competition with AIR and Silverlight 3 will be strong and you need all help you can find – and the best thing that can happen to JavaFX is being included in the default package repositories of popular Linux distros.