Calvin Austin's Blog

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Java on Fiesty Ubuntu - will anyone notice?

Now I had a few days to spare I decided to upgrade my system. I didn't get off to a good start going from breezy to dapper lost some of the packages I had. I then went from dapper to edgy but then my wireless would not work with ndiswrapper (kernel module had DMA allocation issues). Even the new bcm firmware cutter utility would freeze the OS and I had to remove the module from the module list.

I decided to continue with my final goal of getting to Fiesty. First it took all night, and then hung when the bcm cutter was installed. I repeated my previous removal of bcm43xx by booting into the live cd to get to my disk and then continued my update. ndiswrapper was not being loaded so with a quick modprobe ndiswrapper my wireless came to live!

Now for Java, I went to my firefox to http://java.com, the site appeared to be temporarily down. I then did java -version, hmm gcj not Sun Java. I then looked through my package maanger and found Sun Java. Both Java 5 and Java 6 could be downloaded. I went for Java 6

The install was straightfoward compared to the mess of faking ubuntu java dependencies before. I had to accept the DLJ license which was a little confusing as it referred to its own license version (1.1) instead of the Java I was using.

However, how many Ubuntu users will be actively looking for Sun Java. Maybe a clean install will ask but I think many developers will be oblivious to this new effort.

So now I have wireless and Java 6, If only there was now a 64bit browser plugin. I have been very tempted to cut my own, Juergen at Blackdown did a great effort but ran into many browser api compatibility problems. The painful part though is that the plugin is hardly a plugin at all, its essentially the JVM running embedded through some now very outdated APIs. While different groups did own the mozilla/netscape/java relationship before at Sun I think this got lost through many years of layoffs. Now maybe no-one owns it, or has little say to get the 64bit interface nice and clean :(

The unwritten story of open source java

I left Sun in 2004 after 8 fun years at Javasoft. Open Source Java was a annual discussion at Sun and in many conversations with open source advocates and companies. Many of the engineers I knew were for open sourcing Java as long as the motivation wasn't just to simply reduce headcount in engineering. However each proposal got shot down somewhere in the approval process. There were theories on how, who, why but ultimately the result was the same, at best a small compromise in the license but still no open source Java.

However competition is good, in the same way that C# ultimately made Sun continue to invest heavily in Java, the continued investment in projects like Harmony were always on the radar. In addition having a technical relationship with the IBM Java team meant that IBM used every opportunity to request Sun open source Java as every JSR lead was reminded as the defacto IBM comment in the JSR approval process was that IBM request a change in the license

Danese Cooper decided to work out the full timeline of open source Java The People Who Brought You FOSS Java as you can see its been a fairly long road and involved many people. Sun kept many communities involved including the Java champions which I have to give them full credit for, although it would have been even nicer if we could have dropped the NDA! So in closing, this is a great week, could have Java been open sourced earlier, yes but even late in Java's timeline it could be the real jolt that desktop Java needs. Do I think Java will fork?, no, maybe slightly, but nothing that would affect companies that standardize on a version anyhow.

Oh and Dalibor, I really owe you that beer now!

Javaone news: Java on Linux the real story

For reasons that date back to the 90s, and which were never meant to cause GNU/Linux a problem (as at the time it wasn't really on the radar), the Java platform has been licensed in such a way that GNU/Linux distributions couldn't carry it. In addition, the Sun-provided installer for GNU/Linux has, to be charitable, sucked.

Now for those with good memories, of course linux was around in the 90's, infact the original license for JDK 1.1 was friendly to many distributions and made many flowers bloom. Things changed with Java 2 and the SCSL license, of course every linux distribution wanted to have Sun Java on their CD and Sun had agreements with Redhat, Suse, Caldera and others. Any of the restrictive terms were due to Suns binary license and no-one else, for example the license click through on download and install was introduced later and enforced on blackdowns distribution. So Sun built the wall, and forced the click-through sucky installer and knew what it did.

"An unprecedented collection of Debian developers, Ubuntu developers, Sun engineers and Sun lawyers has spent months devising a new binary license for the Java platform"

I can't believe it took this much effort, kudos for those 'unprecedented collections' of Debian and Ubuntu developers for waiting, anyone who uses those distributions knows that they have invested effort into virtual packages anyway to handle offline distributions. Like Wei adds, does this mean fedora will be JDK ready, perhaps...if it does, it will be down to the effort of individuals of course, taking Java back to its roots.

If Java was a car

Kirk Pepperdine, guru of Java performance, recently praised Sun and the Java team for their open bug database and questioned the labelling of enhancements as 'bugs'. At the same time, someone at Sun made a tough decision to slip JDK 6.0. Personally I thought the schedule was never going to fit, it has been a tough time for engineers at Sun and google is a tempting new home for many, so I applaud the move, people remember a bad product for far longer than they remember a delay.

However, given Kirks point and Rays blog together, I think as developers we have get a good deal from Java when I compare it to the car I bought last year.

If Java was a car:

1. You would have to pay to see bug reports (car technical service bulletins)
2. Every 3 to 6 months you would have to stop using it and find something else to use for a day (car service)
3. Unless you were part of a focus group selected you couldn't give product feature requests or track them using a number
4. You could only use a copy for your state, you would have to pay for a different state or country (ok california have fairly tough car laws)
5. Tuning the JVM voids your warranty and insurance

Cars have other advantages of course but it does underline that developers and Java developers do get a certain freedom to influence a product and gain important information for free.

Java wins programming language of the year

Java is the programming language of the year according to the Tiobe index http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm.

Although the index is purely an quantitative web based count of activity , it does also mean it is free from any editorial or company bias. The award is quite unusual as it measures the percentage growth. So that means even if you are bottom of the class you have a chance to win. If you are already at #1, as Java was, it is really hard to achieve. For example C# was close in the running as it grew 1.35% to a measured 3.55% (Java was top with 22.25%) and grew 4.77%

Combined with the new app servers like Geronimo as I blogged previously , this measure of activity could grow even higher.

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