Oracle sticks to Sun's open source strategy for Java

Oracle is seemingly trying to calm down the discussion about the focus of Java programming language development and open source. The business software and database vendor is drawing people's attention to the events and announcements during next week's JavaOne event, which will take place at the same time as Oracle's OpenWorld in-house tradeshow. In a recent announcement, Henrik Ståhl, Senior Director of product management for the Java Platform Group at Oracle, said that Oracle will have the same approach as Sun did with the OpenJDK code base and its community.

The Java Development Kit (JDK) will also continue to be developed as open source under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). Ståhl says that Oracle welcomes collaboration with and submissions from all members of the Java community, regardless of whether they are individuals or organisations. And he promises that Oracle will provide more detail on the topic at JavaOne.

Oracle assumed responsibility for Java when it bought Sun Microsystems. Since then, there has been talk in various communities about whether the character of open source at the company might change. It seems Oracle and former Sun staff have further confused the matter by making imprecise statements about Oracle's strategy, perhaps because they didn't know better themselves. To make things worse, Oracle's charges of patent violations against Google for an alleged breach of copyright and patent rights in the Dalvik Virtual Machine used in the Android operating system led to a lot of speculation and discussion about Oracle's open source position pertaining to Java. Google responded to the lawsuit by cancelling its attendance at JavaOne.

(crve)