Sun loosens tight-fisted grip on Java

December 11, 1998 — Sun Microsystems’s army of Java supporters was heartened this week when the company announced it was moving the language closer to an open-source licensing model, although some of its most loyal supporters say they are still wary of Sun’s ultimate intentions.

Serving as the centerpiece announcement at last week’s Java Business Expo in New York, Sun took the wraps off a Community Source License (CSL) initiative that the company hopes will quiet growing unrest among developers over who should control fundamental Java technologies.

The new licensing program allows developers to freely download Java source code, which they can extend and even sublicense to other developers as long as they agree to later become a Java licensee and pay the required royalties when actual products come to market.

“We think it will be of great benefit to the developers who do not currently have access to the Java source code, and it makes it easier for Java licensees to work together on developing extensions to Java technologies,” said Jason Woodard, IBM’s program manager for Java technical marketing, in Somers, New York.

“For a new technology like Java, letting the user community extend it to meet specialized needs expands the boundaries at which innovation can occur,” said Tim O’Reilly, president and CEO of O’Reilly & Associates, in a statement.

For Sun, this new model is a way to turn Java into a business.

“We will make more money on the royalties, far higher than under the previous model,” said Alan Baratz, president of Sun’s Java Software division, in Cupertino, California.

Baratz expects that the new model will put the controversy surrounding Java’s economic model behind Sun, saying that the new royalty plan for Java-based end products will be in place “for years or the next decade.”

Predictably, Sun’s announcements did not win any new fans in Redmond, Washington.

“Before, Java was open but not open, and now it is open source, but is not open source. Java is not an open standard; it is a double standard,” said Charles Fitzgerald, platform and tools program manager at Microsoft, in Redmond, Washington.

Fear also spread in some quarters among developers last week that Sun’s new model could too closely ape that of arch-rival Microsoft. Specifically, developers claim Sun is setting up Java to be a standard that they still largely control and that could have the same economic sway as Microsoft’s Windows APIs.

“Windows APIs or Java: What’s the difference?” said the head of an influential software industry organization.

Even Java stalwart IBM put a qualifier on its endorsement of the new model this week.

“We are still eager to see the Java standard adopted by an international standards body and will continue to fully support Sun in their intent to submit [pieces of] the Java platform [to the International Standards Organization, or ISO] in February,” Woodard said.

IBM generally agreed that the standards process Sun has proposed — to submit those pieces of Java that are mature, such as the Java Virtual Machine and core class libraries — is a good first step, but would still like to see the entire language turned over to the ISO.