blogs > andrew > software > free-java > soul-searching

Thu, 25 May 2006

A little searching is good for the soul

It’s been an interesting week in Free Java land. The buzz, of course, is about that fact that Sun may finally open source Java after all. All still rumour and speculation (you can easily find comments ranging from “why it will never happen” to “It’s already open source, didn’t you know?” [and no, while Sun finally relenting and allowing the community distros to actually redistribute their JDK binaries is a nice step in the right direction, it’s still non-free, and that’s that]. Still and all, the man has said that Java will be free. It might take them a while, but there’s really no reason to doubt that it will happen.

Which leads people in the Free Java communities to suddenly ponder their own raison d’étre.

It takes a lot of guts to ask yourself uncomfortable questions. “Has what I’ve been working on for the last many years suddenly become irrelevant?” has gotta be pretty high up on the discomfort list. What takes real courage, however, is to pose such rhetorical questions in the open, in a public forum, exposed by the harsh glare of the internet to the scrutiny, criticism and scorn of the world.

Regarding the possible freedom of Sun’s proprietary Java VM and class libraries, Tom Tromey, one of the hackers working on gcj and Classpath recently wrote:

“This makes me feel very weird. I assume for a moment that it is true and that it happens under acceptable conditions: it comes pretty soon, it is complete, it is under a non-crazy license. On the one hand, hallelujah! This is what we’ve wanted these 10 years.

On the other hand… I wonder what I’ll do with myself. I suppose there are plenty of interesting things to work on. Even the Sun JDK I suppose. But the dislocation goes far beyond my future to-do list. What does this mean about all the work I’ve done? Is it a waste?

I do have my own answers for those questions. Everything is born, lives for a while, and dies; our programs are no different. That they die early or late doesn’t render them meaningless — only dead. And meaning itself is something we bring, in interpretation; it isn’t an intrinsic quality. Of course it is one thing to think that and another to know.”

The commentary around Java of late is, in the main, entirely predictable. Some ask if Java is at some perilous crossroads. Others cry out that somehow Java will become irrelevant if it becomes free software. I suspect, however that most prognosticators who write for a living have missed a bet.

More than anything, the one thing that has kept Free and Open Source Software thriving as a phenomenon are its ability to embrace competing views. Not always well, not always politely, but taking in the phenomenon as a whole, competition is at its heart. Sometimes one approach wins out over the others to such a significant degree that the competitors fade away. Sometimes new developments occur in fields long thought static which suddenly shake the industry to its foundations and start entirely new fields off at a run. But quite often, several projects poodle along in the same space quite happily. The constant lament from you read in the trade press is “there’s too much choice” which really makes me laugh. In all the business textbooks on my wall, I can’t find one reference to a company that was dismayed that amongst its suppliers there was competition.

That means that existence of Free Java will continue to have great merit. The Classpath project, along with the libré VMs that use it provide an active and viable alternative to [at the moment] proprietary Java. One factor is the sheer number of platforms that these VMs run on, many which would never have been supported by the dominant player in the industry. Free Java has likewise been the catalyst for radical innovations (witness the marvel that is gcj). But most of all, because it’s competition for the incumbent, people on all sides keep their creative juices flowing.

Per Bothner raised this very constructively in a recent post to the gcj mailing list:

What with the Harmony project, and possible sometime-in-the-future open-sourcing of JDK, we need to think about how can gcj “compete”. I think we need to start focusing more on performance (both speed and footprint), and otherwise “leverage” of the advantages of ahead-of-time-compiling.

which is indeed an astute conversation for them to have — and this from a project that already has a strongly performing platform.

The one thing Sun has done really good job of (at least from the corporate perspective that I certainly have) is preserving the Java specification. As we go forward into somewhat uncertain waters, the one thing above all that will remain critical is the ability of someone to tell whether a given implementation is compatible — and that’s why it’s so important that the compatibility, compliance and testing kits be made libré available. With that in hand, then the fragmentation of the Java platform that the pundits are proclaiming won’t ever be a problem.

Even without it, people have done a pretty good job. The 99.06% API coverage that Classpath has reached is pretty damn good.

AfC

soul-searching, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/software/free-java at 13:40, 25 May 2006.

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