GPL Java: who cares? http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=gpl_java_who_cares
Sun dual-licensing Java under the GPL is a pretty canny marketing move. Does it have any actual impact on any Java developers? Contrary to what every other blog will tell you, nope, it won't.
Believe it or not, you've been able to download the JDK and 'hack' on it for a while now. Some people have even blogged about getting their patches into the JDK sources, or how they got a bug fixed, and so on. There's absolutely nothing new there.
Yet every little fuck and his penis are waggling furiously about how this is a new era of something or the other. Even that perennial turdburglaring hippie Stallman is on board. How low do you have to sink to need an endorsement from him?
Kudos to Sun though for finding a new crowd to suck up to. It's taken close to 10 years for them to switch to the Slashdot cock from MS cock, but it's nice to see that they're still just as desperate to have their mouths and bottoms filled by alien objects.
At least the slashdot crowd has nothing tangible to copy beyond reams of empty promises and communist idealogies. Hopefully things like jsp (asp wannabe) and jsf (winforms wannabe) won't happen again, instead all we'll get is idiotic licenses and endless debates from non-lawyers about what legalese actually means.
What's perplexing is how ignorant most people are of what this actually entails. So many idiotic blog bleatings about how patches can be contributed, about how javac will be speeded up, about how there's going to be a 'super performance' team that churns out amazing JVMs. Yeah, just look at what a great success classpath and kaffe is, and how blazingly fast they are. The only people who now have access to the JDK sources that didn't before are these nutjobs, who in again, close to decade, have done nothing beyond waggle their fingers for endless self-administered prostate massages.
Still, plenty of silver lining. Nice to see classpath and kaffe and all those people fade into irrelevance. Nice to see another nail in Apache Harmony's coffin. Why would you go with a less idealistic and faggotarsey license, and use a product that promises everything, delivers nothing, and continues to exist purely on corporate charity?
IBM's reaction is also pretty hilarious. They're rightfully annoyed that the project isn't an Apache one. It's pretty obvious that the Java branch of Apache at least is more or less owned by IBM. If a project moves to Apache, you know there'll be some IBM people figuring out how to make money out of it and flog it to the hapless websphere molested masses. Sun keeping control means that IBM's spastic global services are going to have a hard time selling the idea that THEY in fact own Java.
So move along folks, there's no real news here. Just a clever marketing move and an appeal to the idiotic spastic masses.