11.28.06
Interview concerning GPL Java
Dalibor Topic has been interviewed (post here) concerning the recent announcement of Sun to make Java GPL, its implication on the Kaffe project.
As far as I am concerned, I strongly believe that Open Sourcing Java will open the door to more innovation and wider adoption around/of this technology. When it comes to high-level languages, the only truly Free (Libre) option on the linux/*NIX desktop was to use Mono/C# (more and more GNOME applications are written in C#). Adding more competition by releasing Java Open source will most probably lead to better, easier to maintain applications.
Another important point about the GPL’ing of Java is that Java itself will benefit from the change. Look at GCJ, for instance, which tries to get rid of the JVM and directly compile java to machine Code. It is yet to prove whether this approach would actually make Java faster, but in any case, it would help to better integrate Java with the unix-way of doing things, instead of having Java on one side, and the whole OS on the other side. Few to no efforts have actually been done in order to mix high-level languages with the system. GCJ is currently struggling to implement both the language and classlib aspects of Java. Once the classlib will be released as Open Source software, GCJ developpers will be able to concentrate on the compiler itself, and on the integration of Java with C/C++ code, which will be an incentive for the people who don’t like JVMs to use Java (after all, Java will just be a simpler C++ that provides a decent library by default).