genjava / editorials / open source java
The open source movement, a branching from the free software movement, has made a massive impact on developers worldwide. It has flung open the closed doors of the computing industry and allows corporate developers worldwide to personally involve themselves in the future of the industry, a traditional stamping ground of academics and businessmen.
Indeed, the open source movement is the culmination and child of the open-academic computing world of the 70's, and the home-computer world of the 80's.
Java is the new language heavyweight champion of the world. It has wrenched that title from C++, made Microsoft prepare a lifeboat of C# to escape from VB, and generally limited Perl to smaller scale projects.
However it has many flaws, politically its greatest is a lack of an open standard and a lack of an open source licence. Sun's dictatorship has been benevelont, but is a dictatorship none-the-less, and while Sun provide access to the source code of Java, viewing that code limits a developers freedoom to compete with that code. The Java Community Process (JCP) has been created to open up the development of the Java platform, but in general it supplies power first to Sun employees, then to other large companies. It would be naive to suggest that Sun politics don't still drive the process.
All is not doom and gloom however. Despite Sun's dubious stance on Java, the very size of the market suggests that it becomes harder and harder for Sun to impose its will on the Java world. The arrival of IBM and Apple as heavyweights in the Java world further limits Suns power.
The current state of Open Source Java is that of a promising sapling. On the server-side, traditionally a strong-hold of the open source movement, there are numerous best-of-breed products. The client application side is awash with projects, admittedly less successful, and Java is being seen as a key component in the top end of the embedded device market, currently mainly proprietary, but it will provide a large market for open source Java to target. Java is seen as the preferred option in working with XML and Web Services, and has been embraced by Apple's new operating system OS X.