IT: Simon Phipps on the Process of Opening Java

[jessica...@yahoo.com]

IT: Simon Phipps on the Process of Opening Java
Posted by timothy on Monday July 24, @02:07PM
from the sniff-the-air-from-the-vacuum-can dept. twofish writes
"Simon Phipps, the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, has
reaffirmed Sun's commitment to Open Source in an interview with
computerworld. The focus of the interview is Simon's efforts to fully
open source Java. He points out that many problems need to be resolved
before Java can be open sourced - ownership, legal, access,
encumbrances and relationships with Java licensees. It took Sun a full
five years to solve these issues with Solaris. However Simon predicts
that it won't take anything near this amount of time to complete the
task with Java. Of course, one of the other concerns for OS Java is the
resulting incompatible versions and breaking of the Java WORA model
(Gosling himself has always been particularly concerned about
incompatible forks resulting in the introduction of an open source
version of Java) and this opens up additional problems for the open
source Java model."