InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill
spoke with James Gosling at the 2004 JavaOne Conference last week
about Java, including the current open source controversy. Gosling:
"Part of me feels like we already have open sourced [Java]. If you
go to the java.sun.com Web site, you can download all of the
sources and you can build your own copy of J2SE and you can edit it
and play with it and do all kinds of stuff. There's a catch,
though, which is that if you want to redistribute it, you have to
pass the test suites, and the test suites are all about
compatibility.
And so many people in the open source community
believe that the compatibility test requirements mean it's not open
source right there. We feel like we're sort of surrounded by many
conflicting interests, and trying to make all these different
parties happy is just nutty. There are researchers at universities
that just want to play. There are platform vendors that want to be
able to do whatever they want. There are platform vendors who sort
of maliciously believe that interoperability is a bad thing. There
are developers who really value having a stable, reliable system.
There are all these constituencies and you try to figure out how
many there [are] in these populations. The size and importance of
the community that values stability and compatibility and
interoperability seems to be the largest. The population that is
the sort of open source zealots tend to be the loudest.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/08/HNgosling_1.html
The long and short of this interview is
another perspective on the inextricable, and
increasingly