Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Java Open Sourced and Abandoned?

I'm tempted to read "instead of producing JDK7 we did JDK6u10 and JavaFX" as "Sun open sourced Java SE and then abandoned it to work on proprietary products (with some pure GPL side effects)". I think that's a bit too cruel, but it's also somewhat true.

The interesting thing is that few people have cared too much. I guess most Java is used in enterprise settings where stability is favored over bleeding edge. The Java community at large is very conservative when it comes to updates and changes. And we're used to just going along with Sun, too, I think (for core Java SE, at least). I think many other projects out there would have been forked by now if something like this happened.

Anyway, hopefully things get back on track some day (with nice licensing for the plug-in, JavaFX, and so on and/or progress on OpenJDK). I mean, Flash/Flex is about as open as JavaFX right now, if I understand things correctly. (And if you really want open, watch HTML 5, WebKit, Mozilla, and such.) Why not just go to the market leader?

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