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Yared to Sun: "Why Is It Good to Open Source OpenSolaris...and Bad to Open Source Java?"

Does Peter Yared's Open Letter to Jonathan Schwartz Take On New Significance Now That Schwartz Is CEO?
By Java News Desk
Article Rating:
May 3, 2006 03:15 AM EDT
Reads:
 17,908
"Why is it good to open source OpenSolaris and OpenOffice and bad to open source Java?" Back in March, ActiveGrid CEO Peter Yared (pictured) wrote an Open Letter posing this question to Jonathan Schwartz. Now that Schwartz is no longer "just" president and COO but has ascended to the giddy heights of CEO...Java Developer's Journal thought it appropriate to bring you again the text of Yared's letter in full. Here it is:

An Open Letter to Jonathan Schwartz

"Dear Jonathan,

Long time no see! The same way you enjoy writing open letters to IBM and others in your blog -- I wanted to write an open letter to you and Sun, and see if I can get a little clarity about your open source software strategy. As I am sure you have noticed, there has been quite a bit of momentum around LAMP in the industry, ranging from innovators like Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon, to the "Web 2.0" crowd like Friendster, MySpace, and Flickr. In addition, LAMP has increasing usage in the enterprise.

The "P" languages in LAMP -- PHP, Python, and Perl -- are all open source, and each provide their own virtual machine. It would be ideal if the Java JVM was open source so that open source projects like PHP could join up with the Java Virtual Machine. In turn, Java would be much more competitive with .Net, which supports numerous languages out of the box. Initiatives like adding dynamic language support in the JVM will not go far if Java can not meet existing languages on a common ground of open source.

What is unfortunate about Sun's open source strategy is that it is very unclear. Can you please answer the following question with a single coherent sentence that people can remember and repeat? If I ask five Sun employees this question, I get five different answers, so having simple answers to these questions will clearly help your own workforce as well as your customers and prospects!

"Why is it good to open source OpenSolaris and OpenOffice and bad to open source Java?"

We all know the standard Sun answer that Java will get fractured and that the JCP is great. However, OpenSolaris and OpenOffice have not been fractured since being open sourced. And most of the Java innovation nowadays comes from open source projects like Spring and Hibernate, not the JCP, which then has to recreate all of these open source projects. Some of the biggest supports of Java, including IBM and BEA and others in the JCP executive committee, have long asked for Java to be open sourced.

So what's up? Can you guys let go a bit and let us all share a single, open source virtual machine? It would be good for Java, good for LAMP, and good for customers. Combining two of the three leading development platforms would make them both more competitive against .Net.

Regards,

Peter"

Published May 3, 2006 – Reads 17,908
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Most Recent Comments
gatzke 05/03/06 04:12:00 AM EDT

Kaffe and GCJ are open source Java implementations, but I don't know how active or good they are.
danharan 05/03/06 03:49:40 AM EDT

Googling "PHP JVM", my second hit was Caucho Resin adds PHP:

> "Caucho, the company behind the open source
> application server Resin and the open Web
> Services protocols Burlap and Hessian, has
> recently added PHP to its list of supported
> features. Apparently, the PHP pages are
> compiled in the background to byte-code, and
> the resulting performance is six times that
> of Apache mod_php!"

Being able to call some of the Java libraries from PHP or even Ruby would be pretty nifty; there's some really top-notch stuff that has been developed in Java.