Since the announcement last week, lots of people have been pondering over what the open source Java release will mean.
As far as I can see, it’s almost entirely about improving acceptance in Linux.
- Distributions with strict restrictions on what licenses they can use, like Debian, will now be able to include Java. I use Debian a bit so I would certainly appreciate it including Java.
- Distributions will be able to build their own style of package of Java, e.g. Debian will be able to make
.deb. Again, I would appreciate being able to install Java from the normal package management tools rather than a separate setup as I currently have.
- Distributions will be able to build optimized binaries for different processors, or provide source packages like Gentoo.
Are there other benefits? Not that will affect many people, in my opinion.
- Windows and Mac users are likely to continue using the standard builds for their systems.
- The JCP is continuing as before, so this doesn’t make any difference to how Java evolves.
- It will be possible to fork the JDK, but any forks won’t be ‘Java’ any more, so people are unlikely to be encouraged to take them up except in specialized niches.
- Students and researchers will be able to see more easily how the ‘Java technology’ works. I can believe that Hotspot has some well thought out ideas in it, but it is far from being the only center for VM research and development.
- Java will be ‘safe’ if Sun ‘goes down’ – but it probably would have been anyway.
