“The future of Java, particularly on the client side, is up for
grabs, after Sun Microsystems Inc. announced last week that it is
quitting the Java standards effort….”
“Sun’s recent actions back that sentiment. Last week, officials
announced that Sun will give away all source code, run times and
binaries of J2SE, eliminating any subsequent royalty fees and
requiring only the passage of compatibility test suites….”
“Rajiv Gupta, general manager of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s E-speak
division, said developers in the open-source community have
promised to create a Java alternative and predicted that the
version would grow in popular ity, like the Linux operating system
or Apache Web server.”
“The difference is this clean-room version will be owned by
the open-source community,” Gupta said. “And the community of
open-source advocates and developers, as Linux has demonstrated, is
much more powerful than any one company.“