Java becomes open source with GPL

This news has been rumoured for some time and turned real on 14 Nov 2006. Just a few months ago Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz was still criticizing the GPL. So what has changed his and other Sun's managers' mind?

Everyone agrees that Sun cannot turn Java software alone into profit. The ones who gain were and are users/developers like middle ware (application servers) BEA, JBOSS (now RedHat), and the Apache communities. The real value of Java is on the platform, associated infrastructure and enterprise penetration. No matter how people criticize the slowness of Java client, Java is still the first software platform (yes, I know .net is getting stream finally) to make complex software infrastructure with cleaner software syntax and structure / flow design - no pointer manipulation, no subtle logic error.

J2EE have seated well in enterprise. In spite of the steps .Net make, enterprise will still be reluctant to put their mission critical applications on Windows alone (especially when people are still reserved on Microsoft/Novell's deal and the future of Mono under such circumstances).

In order to respond to challenge from scripting languages (especially Perl, Python and Ruby), Sun has hired the project leaders of JRuby (a Ruby implementation in Java) starting from October 2006 so that Ruby scripts can incorporate with other Java libraries and JSP.


It seems that Sun have finally realized that it has to turn around its profit model to cope with declining sales of Solaris/Sparc servers.