Eitan Suez's Blog

December 2006 Archives

That Open Source Feelin'

I wanted to wait for the dust to settle a bit before airing my comments on the now dated news that Sun Microsystems has open-sourced Java.

I recall clearly a period of activity on java.net where many (including me) voiced their desire to see Java open-sourced.

Now that this has happened I'm amazed at the correlation of this event with my own experiences. In my career I've open-sourced two projects: ashkelon and JMatter.

Each time the process of letting go and embracing open source was very difficult, even arduous. I took what felt like forever to arrive at the decision. Surprisingly after the decision was made, the feeling was very positive, very rewarding: that I'd shared my work with the community. The same thoughts reverberate: "why did it take me so long to do this?" I believe the reward is of equal or greater magnitude to the effort; that is, it's worth doing.

With my first project, I hadn't yet read Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar. I was a novice when it came to managing an open source project. I still regret that I wasn't able to make the project flourish, though I don't regret for a moment open-sourcing the project. Many used my code and some sent me improvements. There was also at the time an obstacle to this project: the fact that one could not legally publish online javadocs for Java's APIs.

Another correlating fact was my choice of license. Both my projects are available under the GPL. So it's a great feeling of validation to see that Sun has also chosen this license.

One odd way to describe how I feel about Sun open-sourcing Java is that the positive feeling is of equal magnitude to the negative feeling I had when hearing the news of the Novell ship sinking. It gives me hope for the future.

In my mind the parallels that exist between the events that play out in real life: the battle being waged between the forces of open and close code, and between the Star Wars saga are striking. I don't mean to sound cheesy here, but we see time and again how sometimes organizations exert their force by proxy, sometimes anonymously (as in the case of SCO).

One item I've been ranting about to friends (and on this site) for too long is how companies can get away for charging people for software they don't use. Each time I purchase a notebook computer and quickly wipe the disk clean to install Ubuntu, I pay the famous "microsoft tax" for a license of windows I did not ask for.

I would like publicly thank Sun Microsystems for choosing to side with its community, to side with the open-source community on Java. I sincerely hope that a few years from now Sun will be able to say: "we made a good decision; and it has paid off handsomely."

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