The Great Debate

This morning after James Gosling’s keynote, was a panel discussion on the future of Java centering around whether or not it should be opensourced. Mostly the discussion was just a whole bunch of useless hand-waving with IBM saying we want it opensourced, Sun saying we want it to be compatible, Laurance Lessig saying don’t stuff with the open source licenses there are other legal means to ensure compatibility (he never mentioned what any of them were) and the users saying “we don’t give a damn either way”. The one stand out in the argument would have to be our very own Brian Behlendorf who pointed out that the key thing is more about allowing open source implementations of the standards rather than whether Sun’s implementation is opensource itself. He stressed a few times that this did require being able to make available implementations that weren’t yet 100% compliant but *not* claim that they are compliant (essentially you don’t do a 1.0 release until it’s compatible but you can have nightly builds and/or CVS available). I may be slightly twisting what he was saying there but that’s what I took away from it and it’s got to be pretty close to what he meant. So good work Brian!