Independence Day for Java?

I am on sabbatical in Vietnam right now, and today the country celebrates independence day. (On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh gave his declaration of independence speech.) I read James Gosling's latest blog and wondered whether there ever will be independence for Java. As James reminds us, there was a time when Oracle wanted to set Java free. I had naively thought we were pretty much there, with a JDK under GPL. But the situation is much murkier, and it is not at all clear under what conditions one can rely on a freely available Java platform as the foundation of one's work. I read Neal Gafter's blog, in which he writes: “Even though I am a contributor to openjdk7, I do not have a license to Oracle's patents that are necessarily infringed by the use of the openjdk7 source base.” Presumably, there is a process by which Neal could get a patent grant, by getting a license for the TCK, and making his implementation pass it. However, a TCK doesn't yet exist for JDK 7, and the license is only good for GPL implementations that are “being substantially derived from OpenJDK Code”, whatever that may mean. What's all the fuss about? First off, why GPL? That was so Microsoft couldn't “embrace and extend” Java. Fair enough. But why isn't there a straight patent grant that goes with any GPL implementation? As far as I can tell, Sun wanted to have their cake and eat it...

Date: September, 01 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2010/09/01/independence-day-java

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