Sun opens up Java for Linux

Stan Beer
Monday, 13 November 2006 15:08

Your IT - Home IT

The development community has been demanding it for years Sun has finally let down the barriers to one of the most ubiquitous development platforms in the world. Java is to become open sourced under the GNU GPLv2 license, the license favored by the Linux community.

The open sourcing has already begun with the release of the JSE (Java Standard Edition) and JME (Java Micro Edition). This will be followed by releasing the increasingly popular JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) source.

With Java now released under GPLv2, the open source license favoured by Linus Torvalds and the Linux community, Java is expected to soon be freely available with most popular Linux distributions.

Sun, primarily a hardware manufacturer, which made a relatively small proportion of its revenue by selling Java licenses, believes that opening up the source code of the widely used language it developed more than 10 years ago, will encourage increased development of Java applications optimised to run on Sun servers.

As the original developer of Java, Sun has extensive expertise, enabling the company to make money on offering support services and middleware to support Java applications.

A company that has largely been in decline for the past five years, Sun, which still make the lion's share of its revenue from high-end servers running its Solaris flavor of the Unix operating system has moved to revive its fortunes by hitching on to the coat tails of the trend toward open source software and commoditization of hardware.

In addition to releasing a range of low-end x86 servers, Sun open sourced the Solaris operating system Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in 2005 and opened its high-end Sparc platform to run Ubuntu Linux in recent months.