Wrong question. The correct question has always been, and still is, when will Sun submit the Java language to a standards body? As C/C++ has been. And not some one-off European standards body that Sun can unduly influence, either. ANSI should be the standards body responsible for putting together the reference standard for Java.

I am much happier with Sun's Java than most open source projects out there. It's very high quality. I know that I may offend some people, but I think it's higher quality than Linux (as an OS, not kernel). It's my opinion though.

Sun managed to keep it standard is admirable. I think Sun also deserve to make money/own the property it created. Why not develop open source versions of it instead of asking Sun to open source it? One answer I think is that Sun does not have enough resource to fix bug or bring out features quicker for something as large as Java. This is a good argument.

I think it could be addressed differently than Open sourcing it. For example, manage the development better. Provide better incentive for users to submit bug fixes. Promote Java support service so that critical bugs a company needs to be fixed is fixed quicker (it's there, but maynot be promoted enough).

I develop Java enough to know that it's very hard to have a perfect tool to test Java standard. For example, there's no clear spec for Gridbaglayout. What you see isn't enough to implement an exact replacement for what Java has. This is just a simple example to show that stardard is hard to make, hard to be changed quickly.

This brings another point about Java standards. I remember JSF has many bugs that it tooks months to years to be fixed because the standard was broken. I think Sun needs to be much quicker than now to address these issue. These big problems should be fixed in a couple of weeks, or couple of months.

Most people don't wait for a technology for a year or two to adopt it. They use alternative tech. This is usually a one way street and Sun will lose those customers.

Why do people just assume that saying the magic words "open source" will automatically improve a particular piece of software?

Rarely do the most vocal proponents of "open sourcing" something actually get involved and start contributing to the codebase. It's all about religion for the most part, unfortunately.

I still fail to see the benefits of "open sourcing" Java. How will it be improved? It's not as if the engineers at Sun are stupid and don't know how to engineer enterprise software. Don't you think Sun has heard that same complaint from some major league/big $$$$$ customers and done everything they could to improve said performance?

Even if they *do* open it up, I'm sure the parts of the community will still hate them because they don't use a GPL variant license.

It's a lose-lose situation for Sun, I don't get why they would even consider it. Is there a business case that will generate a 9-figure revenue jump from giving away the source for Java? I don't see it, but I'm sure someone around here will happily clue me in.

What makes open sourcing Java such a seductive idea is the wish of Java users to finally get rid of some of the most misimplemented features, such as Date, Swing, AWT, java.net and so on, since Sun engineers seem to be stuck in a mindset of eternal binary compatibility.

If there was a way to achieve those objectives, and to get a full, production ready J2EE SDK on every default Linux installation, that would get people what they want.