Former Sun Exec Calls for Firm to Open-Source Java

In an earlier interview with eWEEK, James Gosling, the creator of Java as well as a Sun fellow and chief technology officer of its Developer Products group, was asked if there would ever be a fully conformant open-source implementation of Java SE from Sun, but his response was open ended.

"Well, there are lots of different answers. One is, Beats the hell out of me. You never know what the future will bring. … If you look at the way that we interact with the community, the way that we have all of our sources out there, we have a lot of people from the community that contribute the way any open-source projects do. Really, the major thing thats an obstacle to truly being open source is the nits in our license about testing. And having our license require testing disqualifies us from the religious blessing of the open-source community," he said.

Asked about the possibility that someone else could do it, Gosling said that while that is a possibility, he does not think it would make a whole lot of difference. "When you look at the J2ME world, there are dozens and dozens of compatible, interoperable JVMs out there. But of course they all do the testing. We have a test suite, and they all run that. And like the Harmony folks at Apache, they say theyre going to run through the tests. If they do that, thats OK," he said at that time.

But Yared maintains that sharing a single virtual machine would be good for Java and good for LAMP, and would combine two of the three leading development platforms, making them both more competitive against .Net.

"So whats up? Can you guys let go a bit and let us all share a single VM?" he concludes in his open letter to Schwartz.

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