Java set free

Ed Daniel — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 12:48:00 GMT

This is quite a milestone for the IT industry and community as a whole. Big pay-off too for those who have been betting on this move.

After countless pressure from various quarters - notably IBM - SUN will now fulfil its promise made by their new CEO, Jonathan Schwarz - to release Java under GPL.

One thing I've not yet checked is whether the JVM is also being released under GPL - that would be icing on the cake for many eager software engineers out there!

More here.

I wonder if Mono will maintain an interest in the community now that this has occurred.

What will IBM do now that they've got what they wanted?

Who else cares?

Above are some of the thoughts going through my head right now.

UPDATE 18/5/07:

Does Sun's open-sourcing of Java have an impact on the way Google views Java as a development platform?

"It doesn't change how we're looking at it, but it does increase the utility of Java for us. So before they had released Java as GPL, we had signed a source code agreement with them where we could give them patches and bugs and all this other stuff—because we have a lot of fairly advanced Java development going on at the company. We have folks like Joshua Bloch working for us and he's a very prominent Java developer and he's involved in the Java Community Process very heavily.

So we always had a way of getting patches in and some features developed. So that was fine for us. But with it being open source, it's actually better for us in a lot of ways, because we can access certain parts of the code in ways we couldn't before. And we can fix them and offer those fixes up without as much ceremony around submitting those patches and features. We can say, OK, it's an open-source project so we can just release this stuff. That's incredibly freeing for us. So we were very happy to see them go GPL there."

Mueller's "No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union" now available

Ed Daniel — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 12:57:00 GMT

Florian Mueller, the founder of the award-winning NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has published his memoir-style book, "No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union", on the Internet.

On 377 pages, Mueller tells the story of the legislative process that ended in July last year with a landslide vote of the European Parliament against a proposal for a software patent directive.

This is an excerpt from the introduciton to the book by Florian Mueller, chronicling the events leading up to one of the most siginificant legislative decisions in European law this decade and of immense impact to our industry.

"On July 6, 2005, the world of politics turned upside down. Big money was dealt a blow.

The European Parliament threw out legislation that the world's largest IT companies badly wanted. Under the pretext of protecting inventors against plagiarists, it would have handed those giants sweeping powers over Europe's high-tech markets. An electronic roll-call vote thwarted the wicked plan in a matter of seconds, but that decision was preceded by years of intense fighting."

Readers of this blog will be aware I follow this - I'll never forget that later that day following my post to the blog we suffered the london bomb attack and lost Colin Morley.

Anyhow, I highly recommend you read this book.

In the pursuit of collaborative intelligence... : Intellectual Property

Java set free

Mueller's "No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union" now available