A rising tide
lifts all boats. If there were ever a philosophy that guided our decision
making at Sun, it's that - the notion that an internet connected by freely
available standards is more valuable, to Sun and our customers, than one
defined by dependencies on proprietary technologies. Although the metaphor
doesn't translate particularly well (I know, I've tortured translators around
the world), the concept is familiar to nearly everyone, no matter the industry
or geography.
History is replete with examples
of failed efforts to defeat standardization. My personal favorite is Thomas
Edison's attempt to patent the lightbulb, so he could threaten litigation
against anyone using an "infringing" non-Edison client bulb
attached to his servers generators. And there are just as many success
stories for broadly adopted standards, from shipping containers to power grids,
air traffic control to the Java platform itself.
Few folks, at least outside of
Sun, understand how pervasively successful the Java platform, and the community
supporting it, have been over the past decade. But Java runs on more devices
than Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, Symbian and the Mac combined. Nearly 4
billion devices at this point, from smart cards to consumer devices, DVD
players to set top boxes, medical equipment, all the way up into the majority
of the world's transactional systems and 8 out of every 10 cellphones sold. The
Java platform is, already, a global standard.
The source code has been
available for years. And we have a robust, multi-party community that defines
the standard, driven by more than 1,000 contributors, from Google to Oracle,
Motorola to Nokia, Apple to Apache, Red Hat, Samsung, Sony, SouJava - if they
matter to the internet, they belong to the Java
Community (with one exception, despite our frequent invitation). Millions
of developers and customers benefit every day.
But over the past few years, our
success has felt increasingly incomplete.
There was an obvious division
growing between those that believed in free software, also known as the open
source community, and those that believed in open standards. And it
felt like we at Sun were straddling a few too many fences - Solaris has become
one of the most popular projects in the open source community, along with Glassfish (our open source Java EE
application server), NetBeans
(our development environment), and another one of my favorites, Project Looking Glass (an
inspiration for many). But the Java platform itself was never listed in that
lineup - because its license was more restrictive, designed to enforce
community compatibility above individual freedom. (Our motives were pure, but
we'd been burned in the past.)
But a rising tide lifts all
boats. And now that Java's established itself beyond a doubt, it's time to take
the next step, to utterly obliterate the barriers to entry for developers
around the world seeking to build the next great device, or the next great
internet service. Whether in the US, Brazil, Poland, China, Tibet, Taiwan,
Europe, Mexico - where ever the internet travels (to more places, at this
point, than even electricity).
And by now, you've seen that's
exactly what we've done. We've followed through on our promise to join hands
with the free software community, and have chosen the Free Software Foundation's
General Public License (known as "the GPL")
as the governing license for the evolution of the Java platform. (Crow and hats
available for those needing a snack :-)
The GPL is the same license used
to manage the evolution of GNU/Linux - in choosing the GPL, we've opened the
door to comingling the communities, and the code itself. (And yes, we picked
GPL version 2 - version 3 isn't available, but we like where the FSF is
headed.)
Picking a license was a very
complex task - we took an enormous breadth of issues to heart in making the
selection, from protecting our customers and licensees, to continuing to foster
a wildly successful developer community. We had to worry about device
manufacturers, media standards, big enterprise systems, government and military
deployments - remember, more businesses and devices leverage Java than any
other development platform. This was no simple feat.
So to the legal team at Sun, and
our friends at the Free Software Foundation - I would like to offer my
heartfelt thanks. We could not have gotten here without you. If Shakespeare had
understood intellectual property, he never would have said
all those mean things.
And in closing, I want to put one
nagging item to rest.
By admitting that one of the
strongest motivations to select the GPL was the announcement made last week by
Novell and Microsoft, suggesting that free and open source software wasn't safe
unless a royalty was being paid. As an executive from one of those companies
said, "free has to have a price."
That's nonsense.
Free software can be free of
royalties, and free of impediments to broadscale, global adoption and
deployment. Witness what we've done with Solaris, and now, what we've done with
Java. Developers are free to pick up the code, and create derivatives. Without
royalty or obligation.
Those that say open source
software can't be safe for customers - or that commercially indemnified
software can't foster community - are merely advancing their own agenda.
Without any basis in fact. They're also fighting a rising tide.