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And that's the 4-star part of the hotel. Guy may or may not come and fix it tomorrow. I'm in the Holiday for the night...

Brother Dalibor in his recent blog entry on his thoughts related to is appointment to the interim governing board of Sun's OpenJDK project (congrats!) said a few things I found worth comment :

I don't work for Sun, IBM, Oracle or any other company making their money with Java, so my influence on the business decisions made by any one of them is going to be limited by their willingness to listen to outside opinions.

I don't understand. OpenJDK is all about one company (Sun) and their business decisions to try and make money with Java. IBM contributed to an open source java implementation - Apache Harmony - long before Sun ever seriously thought about doing so, so I'm not really sure how IBM or Oracle fit into this. You're going to need to influence Sun. You then continue :

I'd like to see OpenJDK rapidly evolve into something larger, and getting that right will be easier to do with all the interested parties involved inside the project, rather than waiting outside it - which is why it is so important to me to get the runtime projects like the Classpath VMs, for example, and GNU Classpath, to become closely associated with OpenJDK (and eventually Apache Harmony & J9 as GPLv3 happens) as soon as possible,

I sorta got the impression that GCJ, Kaffe and GNU Classpath were just going to close up shop because OpenJDK is here ;) Or is that only Red Hat-led projects? Seriously, I'd like to see this too, but I'm not sure how "closely associated" Apache Harmony will get to Open JDK simply because of licensing and IP assignment problems. I guess one way is to try the path we wanted to go down with Harmony, namely look for architectural alignment with things like modularity.

Other ways? Well, a good first step would be to get rid of the requirement that all copyright is held (jointly or otherwise) by Sun, either by abandoning the requirement, or putting it in the hands of a trusted, independent third party. (Sun is having a few problems regarding IP management these days...) That may give you a big shot of credibility with the above mentioned IBMs and Oracles of the world, as that would help level the playing field - they could theoretically participate in the project as peers, rather than simply providing Sun with re-licenseable technology for free. An alternative would be to dual- or re-license the codebase under something commercially useful, like CDDL, CPL, EPL or such to give symmetrical freedom to users, rather than have Sun as the only participant with commercial freedom. (BTW, J9 is a VM owned by IBM, and not available under an open source license, so i don't quite know why it's included above).

Putting that aside, maybe a good first step of the Interim Government would be to explain exactly what the OpenJDK codebase is (it's not Java SE 6 and there is no such thing as Java SE 7) and who can use it and when as an implementation of Java. That should keep you occupied for a while ;)

Rest well - it was a long fight and you fought it with a courage and strength I hope I never have to search for in myself. Our paths really only crossed for a short time, but you were a long-time friend to one so dear to me, and we miss you.

I was reading the latest blog entry from Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun. I really admire the guy, and generally find him insightful and very smart.

However, the blog had a really confused perspective on corporate threats to open source, as well as a bit of confusion regarding their OpenJDK project. Re OpenJDK :

We've seen Java's acceptance made permanent, on servers and desktops and mobile phones and set tops, in no small part due to our decision to use the GPL license (to simplify the Linux/Java combination on consumer devices and industrial applications).

"in no small part"? How about, "in no part whatsoever"? Despite claims to the contrary, Sun actually hasn't released all the source to Java SE, and for the source they did release, it's not of any known version of Java, nor can it be called Java or used as Java. it's seed code for the not-yet-proposed Java SE 7 JSR, a JSR nowhere to be found yet. If the code was complete, you couldn't test it because there's no TCK out there that will let you ship the tested code under an open source license because of field of use restrictions on the shipped code placed there by Sun.

He does, IMO, get it right in the end :

All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach.

Perfect. Now can the ASF have a TCK license that's compatible with "open standards and open source software"? Please?

James Gosling :

And the Apache folks were very angry at us for picking GPL. But we had to pick something. If we'd picked the Apache license, the GPL crowd would be upset with us.

No, Apache isn't "angry" - it's Sun's IP and they can license it as they choose. We believe that people should have the freedom to license their own IP as they see fit. (That's not what the GPL says, btw).

Also, lets be clear - Sun has already picked more than one license. Sun picked the GPL+ClasspathException for the OpenJDK project, but since Sun will maintain copyright over the whole codebase, Sun will be re-licensing the codebase under other licenses for their customers and other purposes. So, Sun could *also* license under the Apache License as well and not invoke the wrath of the "GPL crowd". I'm guessing, rather, that Sun simply doesn't want to because it loses control.

I'm back in Leiden for a few days (where most of Joost engineering is...) and staying at the Tulip Inn. It's the supposedly "3 star" brand of the "Golden Tulip" chain, where they award the Golden Tulip 4 stars. (Clearly european hotels have fallen victim to "star inflation"). In Leiden, there is both a Golden Tulip, and a Tulip Inn. They are the same building. They have only one lobby, one restaurant, one desk. After you check in, you go left into the rooms that are the Tulip Inn, and straight to the rooms that are Golden Tulip.

I called down this morning and asked for coffee. "Sir, we don't have room service in the Tulip Inn". I asked if they have it in the Golden Tulip. "Oh, yes sir". So I asked why they couldn't simply go left rather than straight when delivering the coffee. "Sir, we don't have room service in the Tulip Inn. That's the difference between a 3 and 4 star...."

It seems like room service is a cost center or somerhing. I wonder if they know they can charge for it?

At J1. Rich Green just announced option #1 of my three guesses on the messaging around the JCK.

I was wrong. The description is from here :

Sun is going to make it easy to certify the compatibility of implementations based on OpenJDK code by granting access to the Java SE TCKs under a special license, and that in turn will help safeguard the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" compatibility promise for everyone. The details are still being worked out, but we're committed to compatibility for Java technology as free software.

Good for OpenJDK, but I don't really know what this means. Since OpenJDK isn't actually Java SE 6, it's a future version of Java (like SE 7), I suppose we aren't going to see it for a while.

I'm on the plane to JavaOne, thinking about what we'll hear over the next week. So far, there's been no response from Sun to Apache's open letter (except the weird blog from "jacki", whoever she is...). But there are plenty of rumors about the a JCK announcement by Sun on Tuesday, probably at the keynote. I'm really bad at prediction, so I hate writing something like this, but I'm in the back of a 767 (no, not EOS) and really bored, so here goes.

It's a strange thing, to mention the JCK in a keynote. It's software that 99.999% of all Java developers really don't care about. They just care about having compatible, performant Java. In the Harmony project, that's what we're trying to do, but the license terms under which Sun is offering the JCK are simply unacceptable.

The rumor is that Sun will offer the JCK as open source software. While that would be great, I suspect it won't actually address the problem - I don't believe it means what people are interpreting it to mean :

Current JCKs are available under an open source license, such that using the software as-is tests compatibility, and if passed, bestows all necessary IP as mandated by the JSPA.

Why don't I believe this? Because I can't believe that Sun would have forced the ASF into the open letter with all the negative consequences when they intended to not only comply with the terms of the JSPA as the ASF is requesting, and then go a step further and put the software under an open source license, which would be nice, but not actually a request from the ASF. Why would they do this now? If they had planned this, why wouldn't they have given the ASF a license without the FOU that violates the JSPA - just like every other TCK license the ASF has received from Sun - and then followed up with the open source announcement at JavaOne? They'd be heros to the FLOSS crowd. They'd be heros to me! Now, they find themselves in a public battle with a charity.

So, while the above would be great, I'm guessing it isn't going to happen. I could be totally wrong - it's happened before, more times than I care to admit. But suppose I'm right - what might happen? Here are a few guesses :

1. "It's not whether but when!" - In the same spirit of their "open source Java" announcement, they will announce that the JCK will be open source, in some future version, which may or may not be defined at the time of announcement. I'm guessing Java SE 7 is safe for them - that will be 2009 if history is any guide - which will be time enough for the organization to purge itself of the paranoid elements driving the current rift with the ASF, or if not, to prove the rational POV to be correct - that Harmony isn't any more a risk to Sun's business than OpenJDK is, and that more compatible, open source Java makes the Java ecosystem stronger, which makes Sun's value proposition to their customers even stronger. If I were Jonathan Schwartz, I'd be mighty worried about MSFT distributing a free, open source, cross platform .NET VM. But then again, that's the long view, and Sun seems to be rather quarter-to-quarter focused these days.
2. "The 'Look Ma! No IP!'" - This one is to release the source to the JCK under an open source license but not have it be the official JCK, in the same way that lots of Apache technologies like Tomcat and the XML stuff were the code that went into the RI of Sun's specs, but wasn't officially the RI. This will satisfy the FLOSS crowd, as they don't care about being compatible, and are living under the delusion that they have all necessary IP for an implementation. This will also confuse people quite a bit, as they won't realize that it doesn't solve the problem. Why doesn't it solve the problem? Because in this model, the JCK isn't actually open source - just some test suite that's part of the JCK. By definition, free software and open source software don't have field of use restrictions.
3. "The Flying Stallman" - This option is a bit weirder and also interesting. Imagine if Sun put the source of the JCK tests under the GPL, and then additionally had the JCK license allow FOU-less use on GPL-ed codebases. Note that this JCK license would violate the JSPA in the same way that the current JCK license does, as it doesn't remove the problematic element. It's also interesting as I'd hazard a guess that the FLOSS crowd would stand and salute even thought it's an ironic and clever example of a commercial entity leveraging the restrictions (aka "Freedoms"(TM)) of the GPL for commercial control or advantage. It's a tried and true business model (MySQL, OpenJPA, JBoss, OpenOffice) that works just fine, btw. Would they try something as nutty as this? Well, given Sun's confusion over their current compliance with the JSPA, who knows... it seems that the sky's the limit. Would it work? (With "work" defined as "placate the FLOSS crowd while calming Sun's misguided fears about Harmony") Maybe. I think it depends on the wording. Suppose someone had a project where one entity holds all copyright (like Sun does with OpenJPA). That entity could dual license under both the GPL and something else, but I suppose Sun could argue that their IP doesn't flow to the software under the other license (in violation of the JSPA).

I'll guess it's the first one. It is years away and therefore doesn't need to be sold internally very much....

I'm not sure if I can think of any other possibilities, except one - Sun figures out that moving forward with the ASF is more valuable over the long term than pointlessly trying to protect "make or break the quarter" revenue by taking a legal position that puts the legitimacy of the JCP in doubt. Lets call it a big miscommunication, shall we? Jonathan, I'd love to shake your hand on stage Tuesday (or offstage, or not shake hands, or.... Just send us an email if that's easier...) and move forward in the positive and productive manner that has characterized the relationship between Sun and the ASF for years now. Lets fix this.

Off to one of my favorite conferences, JavaOne. Could be an interesting week...

Or not.