"Sun Microsystems is planning to release the source code of the Java programming language, chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco," reports VNUnet.
"It's not a question of whether we'll open source Java, the question is how, " Schwartz told delegates in his opening keynote at the tradeshow.
Apparently, Sun is still trying to figure that out.
But many people will wonder if it's too little, too late. As eWeek reports:
Longtime open source advocate Bruce Perens of Berkeley, Calif., a former consultant to Hewlett-Packard and other companies, cast a suspicious eye on the moves.
"This strategy is intended to take some of the wind out of the sails of 'Free Java' efforts like GNU Classpath, the four or five open source Java VMs, and GCJ, the GNU Java compiler," Perens told eWEEK.
"Sun intends to provide a 'good-enough' JDK in the hopes that developers will put less effort into its fully open-source competition. But I think the developers will easily see through this. They'll continue their efforts."
Jonathan Schwartz has blogged about it in Java, and Survival of the Most Adaptable.
