Sun open sources Java ME and details future plans

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Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps has announced the next stage of the open sourcing of Java in London this week, adding Java ME to the road map. Open source versions of both Java ME and Java SE should be available by the end of the year.

While there were no actual dates confirmed, Phipps went into more detail on the open source roadmap for Sun's various software platforms. Describing it as a gradual process, he detailed Sun's commitment to providing an open source software stack, from OS to Java, and in the future, its middleware.

Sun is making sure that the open source community is on board, and Phipps spent time at O'Reilly's recent OSCON talking with contributors to the two main open source Java projects, Apache's Harmony and GNU Classpath.

Sun announced the open sourcing of Java SE at this year's Java One, and is working on building a community around the release of JDK 6.0. Codenamed "Mustang", JDK 6.0 already has over 350 contributors - and the only thing that stops it being open source is that it currently isn't under an OSI approved license. Sun intends to release it under an OSI-approved license by the end of 2006, once it is sure that it has all the rights needed to change the license terms for the code. Phipps said that Sun has yet to decide which license to use, though he's got some candidates in mind.

While there are still some encumbrance problems with Java - including code that Sun can't identify the rights holders - Phipps said that he'd "be surprised if there was much more to open source by this time next year". Sun plans to help grow a community around a new portal site.

IT PRO talked with Phipps about the move to opening up Java ME, and how Sun was planning on dealing with the many different Java ME implementations currently available. Phipps felt that while the mobile market was very different to the desktop market, opening up Java ME should make for "a more coherent evolution" of the platform.

Describing an economic model of open source development and governance, he suggested that this coherent evolution was the result of reduced costs, especially as anyone using common code wouldn't need to pay the full costs of any regression testing.

With Java ME now part of the blend Sun's move to open source Java is now close to complete. A community is in place and code for every flavour of Java is about to ship.

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