Women in Technology

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• entire J2SDK is non-profitable...
  2004-03-12 21:59:20  Rick Jelliffe | [View]
  
  
  I think it depends on how the Open Sourcing program is arranged. One way might be for all the Swing classes to be moved into a separate jar file, which was version-upped independently to the JRE. The JRE releases would just contain the most recent version that Sun's QA had approved. Sun wouldn't lose control or the JRE contents. (Perhaps people could then have their own mixed distributions: SUNs's JRE and rt.jar, the open source "html.jar" and IBM's "i18n.jar"!)
  
  

  Another way would be to relax the current licenses further to allow versions of selected components (e.g. HTML) to be farmed off for community maintenance at Java.net (similar to the way OpenJade looks after James Clark's SP and Jade programs at SourveForge). ICU4J is an interesting model in this regard: they pioneer state-of-the-art code (that people can use) but then pass it on to Sun for incorporation into future JREs. These are more controlled options than just letting anyone fork and publish the code, though that is of course another option.
  
  

  But saying "all Swing" goes further than my blog's point: which was that components need to be unified and small enough that small teams which don't dance to multiple masters' tunes can quickly maintain the code. For the HTML library, for example, I don't see that there needs to be DOM support or scriptability: it would be enough that it support the HTML 4 and recent CSS specifications, doesn't barf at XHTML, and handles encodings correctly (and has transparent button backrounds in forms, etc). There is already code around to do all these things. The current APIs should be preserved, as part of the deal, just implemented better. The aim is not "new Swing" (there is already SWT) but "thriving Swing".

• entire J2SDK is non-profitable...
  2004-03-12 08:40:09  jimothy [View]
  
  
  Which APIs are core? I mean this less as a question for me to ask you, but as a question for Sun to ask itself.