Comments on: Open-source Java and compatibility in the Java world

By: SunMink

SunMink — Wed, 24 May 2006 13:06:17 +0000

Grokking Compatibility

One of the strong notes at JavaOne last week was hearing Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green underlining that compatibility is key to open sourcing Sun’s implementation of Java SE (from which the reference implementation is derived, and which is the so…

By: Steve Parker

Steve Parker — Sun, 21 May 2006 23:09:06 +0000

RedHat have suffered some very bad PR from their “Yes we’re open-source but you’ve got to rebuild most of our packages into CentOS/WhiteBox if you want to redistribute our code” attitude, and lost a lot of the (good) credibility which they had built up in the community over the years.

Despite buying and open-sourcing StarOffice->OpenOffice.org, etc, Sun are still seen (by the slashdot crowd, at least) as not terribly F/OSS-friendly; RedHat just about survived the slashdot mauling because of their previously good reputation. I can easily see that the Sun execs would predict the vocal elements of the community taking the view that Sun were “pretending” to open-source Java if they still insisted on retaining the same hold over the “Brand” as before.

A simpler (or at least interim) solution is just to certify a given VM as JRE-Compatible based upon its functionality, but hey, I’m just some simplistic fool ;-)

By: Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock — Sun, 21 May 2006 22:15:50 +0000

Fair enough. I was speaking more of incompatible versions maintained by independent groups (i.e., forks). Not all open-source projects (and, as you point out, non-open-source projects) are created equal when it comes to software engineering discipline. -ian

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 21 May 2006 21:16:05 +0000

Your example of PHP is not great; it can be horrendously incompatible even over minor revisions. If Java were developed along the same lines, it would ruin what Java is supposed to be.

I think the “open source” thing is a red herring in a way though – PHP would be as badly incompatible if it were non-free. It’s about software design.