There's an interesting article at
C|NET News which repeats the fallacy that Sun is a proprietary source company, when Sun has contributed lots of software to the open source world, and not just recently but throughout our history. Another at zdnet blogs relates some discussion made by Rich Green and Laurie Tolson at LinuxWorld yesterday. We haven't settled on licenses or governance models.
In another article at
tech news world Simon Phipps is quoted saying "If I could snap my fingers and make [Java open source] happen tomorrow, I would. It's not a simple endeavor. You can't just slap a license on things. You have to be sure that you have the rights to every line of code. So we have to work through all sorts of issues -- legal, access, encumbrances, relationships with Java licensees," ... this is so very true. It's not just encumbrances, though that's a big deal, but there's a cultural shift that is going on here as well. The Java team has been working on Java for, oh, 13 years or so (11 years since it was made available publicly) in a more traditional product model. To shift to a collaborative community engaging model takes a very different mindset.
My interest, coming from the role I have in the team, is with the role the Quality Team plays in this picture. As the whole picture begins to unfold, as we bring more of this to the public, we can expect the quality team to have more presence. We're thinking about a range of possible projects from publishing metrics, to collaborating on test development and execution, to collaborating on test tools development, and more.
David Herron:
David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.
