Ice's blog

Java is not about the language. According to myself, it has been pretty much a while since this is true. 

When you talk about Java, you're talking in a wider context of surrounding technologies, thousands open source tools, frameworks and extensions that complement each other. You're no longer speaking of a great language that gives the developer all the tools apart from creativity to build whatever she/he wants; you're speaking of even greater set of technologies, concepts and ideas coming from the open source community; you're speaking about the Java ecosystem.

Also, the Open Source paradigm nowadays is surely not what it was at the beginning.

Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, during his Jazoon '08 keynote speech presented the three "waves" or generations of open source, each of which being driven by different motivations.

The first wave was introduced by people such as Richard Stallman, who followed the principle of "software liberty" to create first GNU Emacs and later the rest of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. At the same time, Bill Joy of the University of California at Berkeley (and later Sun Microsystems) and others were working on Berkeley Unix and developing the BSD License in order to further the goal of "Easy Collaboration".

Phipps described the second wave as containing parallel but contrasting approaches: that of the democratic community effort as implemented by the Apache Software Foundation, and the "visionary autocracy" exemplified by Ubuntu Linux, many of whose primary developers work for Canonical Ltd. and follow the vision of Mark Shuttleworth, its founder.

He believe that the third wave is upon us, and with the increasing span of the Open Source market, will partly consist of people moving in who don't share the values of these previous waves and will be largely governed by commercial pressures. He commented that when you create a system, you create the game that plays it, and that as a result, people are already trying to game the system by creating systems that try to take advantage of the market power of Open Source.

There is enormeus innovativity in the Open Source community, by that I mean the serious organizations that are standing firmly behind those projects. Accodring to Phipps, this new wave of 'rethinking' Open Source will open new doors in the enterprise community as we know it.

So there is the Java ecosystem on one side, and the restructuring 'third wave' Open Source paradigm on the other. Put those things together and you might get the 'perfect storm'.

That's why I compare the Java ecosystem as a rolling snowball on a downhill, gaining momentum as it goes...

Until next time,
Ice