The Hindu Business Line : Finally, Sun sets Java `free'

OPEN JAVA: The United Nations Director of Sport and Development and Peace, Mr Djibril Diallo, flanked by the Sun President and CEO, Mr Jonathan Schwartz (left), and the Executive Vice-President (Software), Mr Rich Green, at the JavaOne developers' conference in San Francisco. — Anand Parthasarathy

San Francisco May 11 "We are now the world's largest open source company — and you have come to the world's largest open source developer's conference," the Sun Chief Executive, Mr Jonathan Schwartz, told the annual JavaOne software `mela' here this week.

Then number of registered delegates — touching 15,000 — and the teeming Moscone Convention Centre here, made the latter claim believable.

And as for the boast about the company, that made sense only after the Executive Vice-President (Software), Mr Rich Green, announced that the parent company had completed Java's transformation into a truly free-and-open software platform, adhering to the terms and conditions of GPL 2 — the second and latest version of the General Public Licence created by the Free Software Foundation to regulate how open source and non proprietary software should be copied, modified or distributed.

Commercial Sense

It comes just one year after the new duo at the helm of Sun — Mr Schwartz and Mr Green — decided that going the whole hog in open-sourcing Java made better techno commercial sense for the company, than touting the `O' word, even while holding key elements of the Java code close to its chest.

And having donated its crown jewels, what will Sun say to its shareholders when they yell: "Show me the money?" Mr Schwartz has no fears.

He told the assembled media that Sun sees enough opportunity in addressing the whole new ecosystem of infrastructure that it expects to see around Java in its new, open, avatar. "We've given everything away, and still grew 12 per cent in revenues since last year," he said.

Software Solution

Its first two releases would be JavaFX Script for creating Web sites and JavaFX Mobile an end-to-end software solution for mobile phones. While Sun promised to make both tools freely available to developers, it appeared to bank on licensing applications based on JavaFX Mobile, to fuel its own commercial road map.

A member of the core JavaFX team, Nandini Ramani, was at the stage to demonstrate how the new tool could help create a rich graphical interface for a hand phone, virtually on the fly. The former Sun CEO and current Chairman, Mr Scott McNealy, and the UN's New York based Director in the Office of Sport for Development and Peace, Dr Djibril Diallo, were on hand to help underline Sun's role of evangelist for reaching out to the world's unconnected people.

While supporting many of the UN's digital divide-breaking initiatives, Sun has under Mr McNealy's direction, helped create Web resources for school education, drawing leading institutions into the programme.