Java free for all?

Sean Gallagher has written an interesting roundup on the current state of the free java movement which seemed to gain a bit of steam with Eric Raymond's Let Java Go message last month [thanks to Mir for the pointer].

I'm somewhat ambivalent on the subject.

Although I wish that it were easier for various vendors (be they the various linux distro folks or even higher end OS vendors such as Apple) to provide up to date java distributions, I surely don't want to see massive forking. That was really what the whole Sun vs Microsoft java suit was about.

I believe the Eclipse folks want SWT to be a core part of the system and that has led to this particular push. I want that too, even if it has some drawbacks. Where I draw the line on external innovation is somewhere just above the language byte code and VM layer. I think Sun is concerned about changes that wind up modifying either, in part because they define the Virtual OS which has helped to make java a significant player on the server side.

Write once was a client side mantra that most have decided is beyond silly, but it remains a significant server application concept (with good reason). Despite Sean's reservations, portable J2EE based applications are really quite easy to create. The application developer simply needs to understand where local extensions are needed and wrap them appropriately. Failure to do so today is a developer level issue (in the same way that OS level modifications in every other language have been platform, rather than language specific). In some respects, cross-platform java based server applications have become more difficult to create and maintain in the last couple years; but the complexity is not even close to the previous C/C++ based application mechanisms (while retaining relatively high performance characteristics).

Java is ultimately a (virtual) platform and unlike many others in the same category, it has gained significant attention outside of the primary development community. While I'd like to see the java platform grow and expand, I'd prefer not to see it run in multiple directions (OSS or not, the J2ME thrust seems wrong because it had limited server and client capabilities). Should java go wandering at a low level, the community will also go wandering and the result will not be useful.