Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Sun Open Sourcing Java

Yesterday Sun announced that they will be releasing their Java platform implementations under the GPL v2 (+ Classpath exception for the J2SE libraries). This is great news for the Java ecosystem and for IKVM.NET as well, of course.

A few people have mailed me to ask what this means specifically for IKVM. Here are my current plans (subject to change, as always): When the GPL version of the Java 7 libraries will be released, I will start working on integrating them with IKVM. Some parts of the libraries are not owned by Sun, so there will be holes in what they release, hopefully these can be filled soon (for example by code from GNU Classpath.)

The Sun libraries obviously use native code to interface with the OS, for IKVM this is not ideal (JNI is slow and native code much less secure and robust than managed code), so where feasible I will continue to use my current "native" implementations (e.g. socket and file i/o) based on the .NET Framework.

11/14/2006 7:44:12 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [3]
11/14/2006 12:25:37 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
Isn't it a problem to have a classlibrary released under the GPL instead of LGPL? Indeed, a GPL library imposes that linked applications must be GPL compatible. (Think about Qt).
Laurent Debacker |debackerlAT NOSPAMyahoo dot com
11/14/2006 6:07:51 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
The license is GPLv2 plus Classpath exceptions. Which has the same effect as LGPL. You can use the libriaries in proprietary code. Sun chose GPL + CLasspath exceptions instead of LGPL because this is what the GNU classpath project (oringinal free Java implementation) has been doing.
Matt |mattAT NOSPAMbrowntech dot com
12/3/2006 8:28:51 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
Excellent. This sounds like it would be a boon for the project and I'm glad Sun made the decision to go open source.
J Smith |jsmithAT NOSPAMyahoo dot com
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