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There’s rampant speculation about whether Sun will announce that it is going to open-source Java at the upcoming JavaOne conference. With Scott “I’ll open-source Java when IBM open-sources DB2″ McNealy stepping aside, and John “what about the shareholders” Loiacono now safely ensconsed at Adobe, maybe this time Jonathan Schwartz will follow through all the way and release the reference implementation for Java Enterprise Edition under some form of open-source license, as Sun has done with Solaris. And who knows? Maybe Sun will do the same for Java Standard Edition and Java Mobile Edition.

There’s just one problem: open-sourcing Java won’t change anything at this point.

I’ve been beating the open-source-Java drum for a very long time. Seven years ago (back when some of the plankholders of the JCP were bitching about Sun’s grip on the process, and Sun was arguing that it didn’t want the IP corrupted), I suggested that Sun spin off the JCP as a nonprofit and retain the rights to the Java trademark for revenue-generating purposes–as sort of a half-step toward open-sourcing.

(Ironically, Sun did eventually spin off a nonprofit out of the Java community–except it was GELC, and not the JCP.)

But now that Sun seems close to actually going all the way, it’s almost moot. Open-sourcing Sun’s Java intellectual property won’t dramatically expand the reach of Java into the developer community on the middleware side–there are already open source Java Enterprise implementations that have paved the way. And with an Apache-licensed, J2EE-certified server already available, why would anyone use a CDDL-licensed Java server instead for development (aside from it being the ‘official’ reference version)?

Besides, Java Enterprise Edition has already won the war for a substantial chunk of enterprise architecture, and it did so in great part because of the success of JBoss and Tomcat as development environments (and Eclipse, and all of the other open-source tools built around the Java standard).  On the other hand, Sun has been giving away its reference implementation for free
to developers for a while now. And despite a host of curiosity-inspired
downloads, Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition hasn’t
exactly won Sun much more market share in the enterprise application
server space.

On the desktop, there’s not much room for celebration either.  Sure, an open-source Java Standard Edition could get bundled more tightly into Eclipse–if the licensing model allows it.  But open-sourcing Java probably won’t increase acceptance of Java Standard Edition on Linux, because Sun will most likely veer away from a GNU-compatible licensing scheme. And with Loiacono’s new home making major inroads into the mobile space with Flash as a developer plaform for phones (and fragmentation of the Java Mobile code base) don’t exactly make an open-source JME any more attractive to the mobile developer community.

So, Sun won’t be giving anything up really. Except its royalties off Java certification. But there’s still an opportunity to derive revenue–perhaps a better opportunity than there is with Java’s current licensing scheme–to get trademark licensing and support licensing revenue. Sun wouldn’t necessarily lose any more control over the destiny of enterprise Java than it has already, between the Java Community Process and JBoss and Geronimo already available as open-source.

In effect, Sun has waited until there was nothing left to really lose by open-sourcing Java. As a result, the potential impact that the move could have had, say, three or four years ago has been squandered. With nothing to lose, there is also very little besides PR to gain–other than possibly hoisting off the cost of maintenance of future versions of Java onto the Java developer community.

I was in San Francisco at JavaOne last week. It was great to see so many of the folks from my Java Pro days, and dive back down deep into the language (and the community) for a few days (and it didn’t hurt that I also had my wife and daughter along for some extracurricular activities).

But I skipped the big Wednesday night blowout that Sun threw for Java’s 10th birthday. Dennis Miller was on the bill, and I decided I’d rather spend the evening with Paula and Zoe than listen to some right-wing schmuck.

As it turns out, Miller managed to offend a fair portion of the audience–given that many of them were European, and his routine consisted largely of insulting foriegners. Simon went as far as to apologize on behalf of Sun.

It’s hard enough to find someone funny for these kinds of events (which Miller arguably is not) without the politics. But you’d have thought someone might have (a) done their homework on Miller’s content, or at least (b) briefed him on the demographics of his audience beforehand.

It looks like TheServerSide, the enterprise Java community, has been gobbled up by TechTarget in that company’s pre-bubble burn-rate buying spree. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing for TheServerSide fans in the long term, but I am sure that somebody walked away with a pretty big check.

I’m tinkering with a project to pull down select RSS feeds and, when changes occur, send a summary of them as an instant message over AIM.

I started mulling over how to do this as I was strolling around San Francisco receiving AIM messages on my AT&T Wireless cellphone. There’s a service called JabRSS that provides this, but I’m looking to do something that I can wire to a desktop aggregator, or something I can do a quick config of from my desktop to push stuff to my AIM account .

I could do this in AppleScript, I suppose…but where’s the fun in that? It wouldn’t be cross-platform.

Jabber’s probably at least a good place to start…anybody have other suggestions?

Headed for JavaOne? There’ll be a Java blogger get-together on Monday at the Thirsty Bear–if they can fit all of us in.

A little bird tells me that BEA officially said today what Darryl Taft reported a week ago–that BEA will open-source the framework for its Weblogic Workshop, under the project name “Beehive.”

Workshop is BEA’s effort to Visual-Basic-ize J2EE development. I saw a demo of it during Adam Bosworth’s introduction of Workshop at BEA’s eWorld conference a year ago (the event where I picked up my nifty Scott Dietzen bobble-head). It uses meta-data, like the “properties” box for VB controls, to configure objects within the framework. I thought it was a good idea, but the implementation left a little to be desired.

That, plus the demo was based on “Minority Report” — a Department of Precrime interceptor-routing application. A little too irony-free for my taste, thanks.

Anyway, open-sourcing Workshop’s framework should at least help them pick up some steam in terms of others building Workshop-ready J2EE objects. Or, at least, it might. Maybe. Possibly. Can I shove any more qualifiers on the end of this paragraph?

Or, it could be a sign that BEA is having trouble getting adoption, is tired of spending money on Workshop, and is foisting it off on a volunteer workforce to maintain. But they’d never do something that cynical. Maybe.

In the wake of the J2EE 1.4 announcement, and the pronounced “settling” going on at Sun as it restructures itself around the Schwartz regime, a couple of things have become clear about where Schwartz is taking the company’s strategy. And there’s not a whole lot in it that will make the die-hard open-sourcers out there happy.

For one thing, it appears that Schwartz’s answer to the cries for open source Java is free software, as in free beer (not free speech). The platform is free; however, to actually get the pieces that make it work without the requirement for a doctoral degree in software engineering, you’ll need to pay $50 per employee per year.

Then there’s Linux. Schwartz has taken the “we’re more open than Red Hat” tack, claiming that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a proprietary fork of Linux and therefore no more “open” than Solaris. Which, by most informed and neutral accounts, is total bullshit.

Closed is Open. Slavery is Freedom. Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before.

Meanwhile, JBoss and Apache are preparing to make Sun’s “reference implementation” moot. Once Geronimo gets J2EE-certified with its scholarship-funded TCK, then the genie is out of the bottle, and Schwartz won’t even be able to give Java Enterprise System licenses away as JavaOne party favors. Sure, IBM and BEA won’t be able to dominate the market once the airlock is opened, but there won’t be much point in calling the Sun code the “reference implementation” anymore–anything built on the Apache-licensed Geronimo will essentially be pre-blessed as J2EE compatible without the need to license the TCK.

The maneuvering with Microsoft also raises questions about the viability of Sun’s continued support of OpenOffice.org. If Sun incorporates Microsoft IP into StarOffice and the Java Desktop Environment, then it will doubtlessly have to cordon off that work from OpenOffice to avoid open-source license contamination of said Microsoft IP. Which means totally forking StarOffice from the OpenOffice code base.

So, that leaves the open source background strategy at Sun somewhat up the creek sans paddles, boat, or survival rations, doesn’t it? And in the process, it sort of shafts Sun’s own enterprise Java ambitions in the process–by failing to take a leadership role in open source, Sun falls on its own Java sword.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s some big plan hatching in Menlo Park that I don’t know about. But I doubt it. And I sincerely doubt that Sun’s positioning of Solaris will stop its bleed-out of OS market share to Linux, as the open-source OS spreads inward from the edges of the enterprise to the core.

IBM is acquiring Rational Software. I guess if you can't make good tools, you buy them. Okay, that's a little catty, I admit; Visual Age doesn't suck *that* bad, and adding Rational's tools will help a lot with IBM's target market–institutionalized, methodology-driven, architectural software development.