Stephen Shankland quotes a Sun VP saying the mobile version of JavaFX will be “binary only”. However, the FAQ on JavaFX indicates it will be “open-sourced”.
“JavaFX is a binary product. You can’t have fragmentation if it’s a binary implementation,” Green said. “That business model saves time and energy on the part of licensees who don’t have to spend time mucking with source code.” ()
Which is it? Will the mobile version be the only part encumbered by a non-OSS license? or is Green referring to a dual license model? Isn’t this contrary to Sun’s stategy of open-sourcing their entire stack? Seems like a giant step backwards.
He is referring here to JavaFX Mobile not JavaFX Script. I think the software license to manufacturers will be for a ‘Sun Stamped’ version of the software (Binary Package), the same software will be available to the community as open source. Keep in mind that Solaris is a binary product, OpenSolaris is the code base, maybe we will see something similar. Maybe we will see an ARM port of OpenSolaris to replace the Linux kernel they currently use…who knows.
Che, At first I had assumed that this JavaFX mobile offering was a productized version of the open-source offering, like your Solaris to OpenSolaris analogy. I can see this fitting into Sun’s complete open-source stack if it followed a dual license model like many other FLOSS companis have (ala MySQL, TrollTech, etc). However, the confusion on this issue stems from the quote above, where Green’s comments about them selecting a “binary” model for JavaFX Mobile as it prevents “fragmentation”. This makes it sound like they do not plan to open-source all of the pieces behind JavaFX Mobile in order to prevent forks. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with this. There are quite a few efforts to capture the mobile space at the moment, I doubt manufactures will want to be locked in to a proprietary OS and software stack.
I’m just thinking now – what would lead me to using a Sun provided stack that was otherwise provided as open source…
As an individual consumer, absolutely nothing would lead me to seek out commercial support for a mobile phone operating system. If however i was say…LG, I would prefer to have some sort of certified offering…particularly with the fact that the new breed of smart phone’s are essentially a personal computer in a smaller size.
Consider this; LG role their own Linux based OS, they then have to support a full product life cycle of bug fixes, security patches and enhancements. If however they licensed a sun supported ‘binary package’ that was a fully certified and supported offering from SUN they would not have the full life cycle commitment that would come with a home-rolled version. Essentially they could take this productized Mobile OS, build their hardware around it, add branding and/or added value proprietary applications and go to market.
It seems like they have something decent to offer the market. A full featured stack, ready to go to market, perhaps with a support offering. I can see only Symbian and Microsoft as competitors here.