On Sunday, January 6, 2013 11:24:41 PM UTC+1, Simon Ochsenreither wrote: > > > OpenJDK is as much open source as Android: it is in the licensing sense; > but not in the community and collaboration sense. > Someone should probably invent a new word for it, so that people don't > have false assumptions. >
For far too long, people (in this group as well) have inflated "open source" with artificial attributes. It's odd really, because the wording is quite precise; the source code is open for inspection, and depending on the license, open for modification. However, just how the project is governed is out of the scope of any OSS-license that I am aware of. While it's really nice to have code available, at the end of the day, it's more important to use an open standard than open source - the source is simply an implementation detail, nothing more and nothing less. That's my main beef with Java, it is not as much a standardized syntax and API as it is a narrow 3-tier product (JME/JSE/JEE); as Microsoft, Apache and Google would come to learn each their own way (arguably Microsoft the least elegant of the crowd). It seems the best we can hope for then, is when open source and open standards intersect. However, even so, regardless of it being a committee or Linus Torvalds, somebody needs to coordinate and standardize around a mainline with a trademark (Java, .NET, Android, Ubuntu etc.). In the case of Java, it's just unfortunate that there's a heavy tie to a required runtime environment which Oracle doesn't really know what to do with. Let's keep in mind, that Lombok itself is a symptom of lack of features in the language which btw. Google is also exploring (i.e. Android R file generation). The Java space seems divided into 3 groups now: those who continue the vanilla road, those who explore workarounds and finally (an ever increasing) group of people who left the ecosystem over alternatives like Clojure, Scala etc. and who for practical purposes might as well substitute the JVM with Parrot, CLR, whatever. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/eZ67aFMj_zQJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
