5 ms·

Redhat is a big contributor to OpenJDK, so there's really less of a "maybe not" than you think. Even Azul maintains an OpenJDK distribution, so copyleft is play

by ece 6y ago

Redhat is a big contributor to OpenJDK, so there's really less of a "maybe not" than you think. Even Azul maintains an OpenJDK distribution, so copyleft is playing a part in keeping things more open and supported than not.

Alupis 6y ago
The part OP missed, and perhaps you may be overlooking, is none of these companies are required to use OpenJDK (and the GPL'ed code) for some unavoidable business reason. They opted-into using it consciously. Red Hat because they embrace Open Source above all else (or at least did at the time), and Azul as opportunists during the decline of Oracle JDK as a way to get Java users into their ecosystem (and eventually make money). OpenJDK is wildly popular as the defacto reference implementation of Java, due to moves Oracle made a few years back (on purpose to push Java language development into a more community-driven approach). OpenJDK is good, but there are reasons people seek out custom implementations (massive heaps, pauseless GC, better tooling and monitoring, re-implemented IO, etc). All that is to say, contrary to OP's original assertion, it's not that Red Hat "couldn't" release some closed source JDK... they chose to embrace the GPL'ed code. The notion that "Copyleft Works!" is by compelling companies to open source their GPL'ed code. That's not what happened here.
- ece 6y ago
  This is really a distinction without a difference, none of these companies choose to forego a OpenJDK distribution and all of them actually contribute to it. If it wasn't compelling to do these things, they wouldn't do it. FOSS and copyleft isn't about requiring anyone to do anything, it's about increasing user freedoms. Users and developers have more choice today in the Java ecosystem thanks to all of JDK distributions. I think it's you who has mistaken OPs comment to mean companies are being required to do something, when in fact everyone is benefiting by playing by the same copyleft rules.
- pron 6y ago
  Just so that people understand, OpenJDK is the name of Oracle's implementation of Java, to which Red Hat, SAP, Intel, Azul, Google, Twitter and others contribute, but Oracle contributes ~90% of the work. "Oracle JDK" is Oracle's support subscription, but the source code to that software is OpenJDK. A couple of years ago Oracle completed open-sourcing the entire JDK, making the JDK fully free and open source for the first time in Java's history, and now it offers no proprietary features. It also started focusing more on, and shifting people's attention to, the OpenJDK brand. Because Oracle owns the OpenJDK code, only Oracle and companies that license the OpenJDK source code under a proprietary license from Oracle, like Azul, can release closed-source implementations of the JDK that are based on OpenJDK. (I work at Oracle on Java, i.e. OpenJDK)
  - syrrim 6y ago
    If others contribute to it, how can oracle license it to azul?
    - pron 6y ago
      Like other large open-source projects by Google, Microsoft and others, contributors sign a contributor's agreement that gives Oracle joint ownership. This means that, in addition to the GPL license, either you or Oracle can license that code as you or they please. This is a fairly standard practice.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement
    - Cullinet 6y ago
      there's so much confusion about this maybe a analogy, loath as I am, may help : call a architect and construction management company Oracle and a contractor interior designer / HVAC specialist Azul providing specific undertakings to complete a number of the apartments in different specifications from the Oracle standard. To obtain the opportunity to sell individual apartments for profit in the condo, Azul undertakes to complete a amount of general labor throughout the construction project. The two agreeing to build a condo both will both let apartments therein, however regardless of what proportionate contribution and value of labor Azul provides, the title absolute and whole equity demise to Oracle because there would be no project without Oracle. Hereby Azul are being paid for all their contributing work with the concession and ability to sublet their allocated apartments with variations in specifications independently and without any lien to Oracle once their part is done. Oracle being the project lead and majority financiers, contracted to retain the option of applying the same specifications and features built by Azul to their wholly owned apartments. of course the analogy breaks there because in software applying the Azul spec to more properties doesn't cost additional labor. Such is the intrinsic and amazing value of leading valuable software initiatives. I'm tempted to suspect that my analogy makes visible to see a unfortunate development in popular opinion concerning software that has emerged in this century : like with property there seems to be intrinsically personal and non objective assumption of illicit and unseen practices at work in creating the accrual to the capital investor which is their whole and fundamentally natural right to receive and enjoy. this worries me because it effectively co-opts the incredible natural beauty and value of software : labor free replication and reuse. I will go so far as - only because of the contexts in which I have recently been caused to defend / explain the economics, which have been not pleasant experiences - to say that this is a terrifying and insidious assault on the most important advance of capitalism itself. with the Times of London in 2018 revealing the record shows Harold Wilson when Prime Minister in 1958 was permitted to receive a prize for poetry composition awarded by the Soviet GDR of £20,000 then that would have bought properties worth over ten million pounds today... Wilson and May and Johnson all unelected and May creating laws for internal passport and visa civilian movement control only after the maximum 3 statutory refusals by Parliament (Lords rejecting) to pass the law before prerogative force majeur was used to force the legislation that devolved the entire legislation and executive implementation of British law to secret meetings without any reporting rules of any two members of the privy council... the last points you can research at statewatch.org and I must say that I profoundly wish I was inventing this but everything is entirely public information, as is how shortly after that "prize" award, Wilson told a delegation representing all Jewish members of Parliament who sought advice after the security services confirmed their relatives in Soviet counties were credibly threatened and being bullied to seek to cause a reversal to the British position on Palestine which wasn't to grant independence and create Israel at all. I never remember his Foreign Secretary of the time but if you find his long out of print memoir the names are named and it's fully revealed by the highest office concerned. and to this day people wonder why there's anti semitism rampant in the Labour Party. no shoot Sherlock, after Wilson slapped the official secrets act to conceal him throwing the members to the wind without any support or advice, obviously their colleagues considered the en bloc vote face to be treasonous betrayal. We're hiding known public history despite doing so causing incredible tension and racism and intolerance and neutering the only constitutional opposition party we have.. full disclosure : I'm child of a father born 1907 and my uncle who taught me to code b.1900 the one a banker and spy during the war and uncle director of the war office, so I grew up with traditional transatlantic political values that simply no longer exist for at least 30 years. I remember when Bangladesh made the core memory for the PDPs. Which stopped in 80 when Zia demanded Bangladesh cut off for Pakistan to support the CIA in Afghanistan. Samsung only opened a factory in Bangladesh 2 years ago at last. it shouldn't have been so grim and the betrayals are worse than there's time for a book how Britain throws people to the wolves to the advantage of the Soviet initiative. if you don't believe that continues, read the very good Buzz feed series on the assassinations in Britain and how May personally riled the USA and France to high heaven when she declared investigations into obviously professional hits shut and suicide despite a orgy of comic book evidence taunting the question "you can't work out how we did this ". I'm very grateful that critical parts of the software world remain American, as result, no matter how much I want to reintroduce the UK to its balls.

by ece 6y ago

Alupis 6y ago

The part OP missed, and perhaps you may be overlooking, is none of these companies are required to use OpenJDK (and the GPL'ed code) for some unavoidable business reason. They opted-into using it consciously. Red Hat because they embrace Open Source above all else (or at least did at the time), and Azul as opportunists during the decline of Oracle JDK as a way to get Java users into their ecosystem (and eventually make money). OpenJDK is wildly popular as the defacto reference implementation of Java, due to moves Oracle made a few years back (on purpose to push Java language development into a more community-driven approach). OpenJDK is good, but there are reasons people seek out custom implementations (massive heaps, pauseless GC, better tooling and monitoring, re-implemented IO, etc). All that is to say, contrary to OP's original assertion, it's not that Red Hat "couldn't" release some closed source JDK... they chose to embrace the GPL'ed code. The notion that "Copyleft Works!" is by compelling companies to open source their GPL'ed code. That's not what happened here.

ece 6y ago
This is really a distinction without a difference, none of these companies choose to forego a OpenJDK distribution and all of them actually contribute to it. If it wasn't compelling to do these things, they wouldn't do it. FOSS and copyleft isn't about requiring anyone to do anything, it's about increasing user freedoms. Users and developers have more choice today in the Java ecosystem thanks to all of JDK distributions. I think it's you who has mistaken OPs comment to mean companies are being required to do something, when in fact everyone is benefiting by playing by the same copyleft rules.
pron 6y ago
Just so that people understand, OpenJDK is the name of Oracle's implementation of Java, to which Red Hat, SAP, Intel, Azul, Google, Twitter and others contribute, but Oracle contributes ~90% of the work. "Oracle JDK" is Oracle's support subscription, but the source code to that software is OpenJDK. A couple of years ago Oracle completed open-sourcing the entire JDK, making the JDK fully free and open source for the first time in Java's history, and now it offers no proprietary features. It also started focusing more on, and shifting people's attention to, the OpenJDK brand. Because Oracle owns the OpenJDK code, only Oracle and companies that license the OpenJDK source code under a proprietary license from Oracle, like Azul, can release closed-source implementations of the JDK that are based on OpenJDK. (I work at Oracle on Java, i.e. OpenJDK)
- syrrim 6y ago
  If others contribute to it, how can oracle license it to azul?
  - pron 6y ago
    Like other large open-source projects by Google, Microsoft and others, contributors sign a contributor's agreement that gives Oracle joint ownership. This means that, in addition to the GPL license, either you or Oracle can license that code as you or they please. This is a fairly standard practice.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement
  - Cullinet 6y ago
    there's so much confusion about this maybe a analogy, loath as I am, may help : call a architect and construction management company Oracle and a contractor interior designer / HVAC specialist Azul providing specific undertakings to complete a number of the apartments in different specifications from the Oracle standard. To obtain the opportunity to sell individual apartments for profit in the condo, Azul undertakes to complete a amount of general labor throughout the construction project. The two agreeing to build a condo both will both let apartments therein, however regardless of what proportionate contribution and value of labor Azul provides, the title absolute and whole equity demise to Oracle because there would be no project without Oracle. Hereby Azul are being paid for all their contributing work with the concession and ability to sublet their allocated apartments with variations in specifications independently and without any lien to Oracle once their part is done. Oracle being the project lead and majority financiers, contracted to retain the option of applying the same specifications and features built by Azul to their wholly owned apartments. of course the analogy breaks there because in software applying the Azul spec to more properties doesn't cost additional labor. Such is the intrinsic and amazing value of leading valuable software initiatives. I'm tempted to suspect that my analogy makes visible to see a unfortunate development in popular opinion concerning software that has emerged in this century : like with property there seems to be intrinsically personal and non objective assumption of illicit and unseen practices at work in creating the accrual to the capital investor which is their whole and fundamentally natural right to receive and enjoy. this worries me because it effectively co-opts the incredible natural beauty and value of software : labor free replication and reuse. I will go so far as - only because of the contexts in which I have recently been caused to defend / explain the economics, which have been not pleasant experiences - to say that this is a terrifying and insidious assault on the most important advance of capitalism itself. with the Times of London in 2018 revealing the record shows Harold Wilson when Prime Minister in 1958 was permitted to receive a prize for poetry composition awarded by the Soviet GDR of £20,000 then that would have bought properties worth over ten million pounds today... Wilson and May and Johnson all unelected and May creating laws for internal passport and visa civilian movement control only after the maximum 3 statutory refusals by Parliament (Lords rejecting) to pass the law before prerogative force majeur was used to force the legislation that devolved the entire legislation and executive implementation of British law to secret meetings without any reporting rules of any two members of the privy council... the last points you can research at statewatch.org and I must say that I profoundly wish I was inventing this but everything is entirely public information, as is how shortly after that "prize" award, Wilson told a delegation representing all Jewish members of Parliament who sought advice after the security services confirmed their relatives in Soviet counties were credibly threatened and being bullied to seek to cause a reversal to the British position on Palestine which wasn't to grant independence and create Israel at all. I never remember his Foreign Secretary of the time but if you find his long out of print memoir the names are named and it's fully revealed by the highest office concerned. and to this day people wonder why there's anti semitism rampant in the Labour Party. no shoot Sherlock, after Wilson slapped the official secrets act to conceal him throwing the members to the wind without any support or advice, obviously their colleagues considered the en bloc vote face to be treasonous betrayal. We're hiding known public history despite doing so causing incredible tension and racism and intolerance and neutering the only constitutional opposition party we have.. full disclosure : I'm child of a father born 1907 and my uncle who taught me to code b.1900 the one a banker and spy during the war and uncle director of the war office, so I grew up with traditional transatlantic political values that simply no longer exist for at least 30 years. I remember when Bangladesh made the core memory for the PDPs. Which stopped in 80 when Zia demanded Bangladesh cut off for Pakistan to support the CIA in Afghanistan. Samsung only opened a factory in Bangladesh 2 years ago at last. it shouldn't have been so grim and the betrayals are worse than there's time for a book how Britain throws people to the wolves to the advantage of the Soviet initiative. if you don't believe that continues, read the very good Buzz feed series on the assassinations in Britain and how May personally riled the USA and France to high heaven when she declared investigations into obviously professional hits shut and suicide despite a orgy of comic book evidence taunting the question "you can't work out how we did this ". I'm very grateful that critical parts of the software world remain American, as result, no matter how much I want to reintroduce the UK to its balls.