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Until recently, the ongoing Sun-IBM "open" Java debate had been a quiet collaboration (witness the agreement to allow Apache a "scholarship" for certification of Geronimo). That quiet debate had the lid blown clean off it recently by a series of very public (some might even say grandstanding) moves by Sun and IBM. The results are less about who's right than they are about who can play the media trump card better.
I've spoken with people from IBM and Sun over the past few weeks, as well as some of the other players in this developer melodrama. And here, best I can tell, is the gist of the ongoing thumb-wrestling match for world domination between the two:
First of all, there are people within both companies who very much want to see a single, unified, open-source implementation of Java--without forks, without compatibility breakdown-- to help widen adoption of the technology (and get it in the same CD set with every Linux distribution).
But Sun wants to continue to derive revenue from Java licensing; Sun spokespeople say that the Technology Compatibility Kit license fees barely support the organization that puts them together, so all of the actual money that Sun derives from Java (aside from the sale of its own Java products) is from licensing the source code to the reference implementation (including, on the J2EE side, the same source code that makes up the Sun Java Enterprise Systen application server). Obviously, IBM is less concerned about whether Sun will be able to continue to derive revenue from licensing the reference implementation. And it appears some business-side people at IBM see some advantage to following a different route to open source--one that leaves compatibility (and the need for them to continue to license Java code) out of the final equation.You can understand, at some level, IBM business managers' frustration. They've dumped a considerable amount of IP into Java, and they still have to pay license fees for it. About 80% of the original J2EE was written by IBM.
On the other hand, you could see IBM's recent comments as a friendly push. At least that's how IBM sees it. "We've tried to be relentlessly cheerful about this," Bob Sutor, IBM s director of Websphere infrastructure software products, told me. "We're really trying to be positive and constructive about this. We're not saying tomorrow you have to do this. "We're saying,Java's big when you look at the whole thing, let's start s lowly, figure out what we're talking about, see how we can phase this thing in, what makes sense so all the stakeholders can get what they want out of this thing, and take it from there. "
Regardless of the intent, the whole thing has taken what had been a very long, quiet conversation about the open source future of Java and turned it into something of a circus. Open-source true believers, like Eric Raymond, have been lobbing their own grenades from the sidelines, making the last month a very interesting one, in a Chinese-curse sense.
