| Google wasn't exactly the only company trying to sidestep around Sun and their
annoying business model and licensing.
Around ten years ago, IBM developed
an extensible, open source IDE for building Java apps, and used it heavily for
internal development and as the foundation for their own products. Guess what
this IDE was named? "Eclipse". Yeah, that's not a coincidence.
Just down
the hall from the Eclipse team, was one of IBM's several JVM-replacement
projects: the J9 VM. Staffed with former Smalltalk VM experts, this team grew
to be the most successful of IBM's several competing JVM projects. (Most of the
other JVM projects were eventually killed off and their resources redirected to
the J9 project.) At one time they had a complete cleanroom re-implementation of
the Java class libraries which was used by IBM and other companies in a lot of
production environments (including many embedded platforms that were not
supported by Sun's implementation). Years have passed, and I don't know if
those class libraries are still used, or if they switched to licensing Sun's
implementation. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
