Jonathan Schwartz (Score:5, Informative) vs Scott McNealy (Score:1, Funny)

Scott McNealy is stepping down as Sun CEO and will be succeeded by the No. 2 executive, Jonathan Schwhartz.

Somehow I think this is very, very good for the FLOSS communities as well as for Sun. I've never been a fan of McNealys tiresome and sales oriented (as in: not all that fact based) bashing retorics. I'm also under the impression (don't sue me if I'm wrong) that Schwartz really understands FLOSS and it's value for Sun. Sun is a huge contributer already: OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, Niagara (Verilog sourcecode for the processor with more cores than you can count on your fingers and toes) and more. Schwartz recently blogged about the possibility to release OpenSolaris under GPL3 (in addition to CDDL), and my opinion is that we can expect Sun to release Java as FLOSS a bit sooner with Schwartz as CEO. Yes, free (official) Java will happen, it's just a matter of time.

The independant FLOSS Java stack so far is very impressing; a bunch of VM:s (some tiny and easy to port, some heavier with good JIT compilers), GCJ (GCC java with AOT support), ECJ (awesome compiler part of the Eclipse project), Classpath (the libraries with better quality every day), Eclipse IDE (that's enterprise-ready for you), SWT (FLOSS widget toolkit, an alternative to Swing, used by Eclipse and others), Java-GNOME (a set of Java bindings for the GNOME and GTK+ libraries), JOnAS (an implementation of the J2EE spec), JBoss (let me hear you say enterprise-ready once again, the company got recently acquired by Red Hat) and more.

The biggest problem with FLOSS Java today is the incomplete implementation of the class libraries (Classpath), but don't feel too worried about the FLOSS Java future because it's:

1. Really good today and constantly improving



2. Getting more momentum with strong support from companies and foundations such as Red Hat, Apache and IBM (all of which are big supporters and users of Java) - you did read about the Harmony project, didn't you? and



3. Very soon such a serious alternative to Sun Java that Sun will need to set its own Java free (mainly the class libraries but the VM would be nice as well, so would the compiler but neither are crucial) - you all do realise that Sun Glassfish ("a free, open source application server") is a response to the success of JBoss and JOnAS?

And then don't forget a FLOSS .NET, which in its Mono implementation is very good today and will improve further. The times they are a-changin'.