Is this the start of an era of cold battle between Sun and IBM?

Filed in archive Business on August 13, 2007

Java, Java and Java, this name itself has been a reason for feud between Sun and a number of companies including Microsoft but here we seem to be witnessing another battle of sorts between Sun Microsystems and IBM though we wouldn't term it as an open battle in the current circumstances. You all must be aware that Sun has released the OpenJDK Test Compatibility Kit for Java SE 6 under the GPL v2 license and this is something which is not appreciated by Apache and in the case of GPL every technological enhancement undertaken in the software must be contributed back to the community under the same license whereas Apache is more relaxed in this respect and it allows the vendors to keep their enhancements to themselves.

This has been creating problem of sorts for Apache as Sun's stand is affecting the status of Harmony which is the Apache implementation of Java SE. The difference in license has been preventing Apache from updating Harmony beyond SE 5. This divergence can be related to the fear which Sun has at the back of its mind with regards to vendors taking control over Java in a similar manner where Eclipse seems to have taken over Sun's vision of a unified Java tooling environment. Though Sun's decision of chucking CDDL license in favor of GPL can be seen as a move to embrace open source but in the process it seems to have hurt Apache. It's rightly said that you cannot satisfy everybody in the process but does this signal a start of a long term cold battle between Sun and IBM? I would probably agree to it.