Will Oracle Ditch Sun’s Open-Source Commitments?

“It seems the company is willing to contribute where it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s also not interested in doing some of the long-range heavy lifting that many FOSS vendors do to move open-source forward,” Brockmeier said. “Maybe an infusion of Sun DNA will encourage Oracle to step up and be a more active player in FOSS. If not, it’s a net loss for the community.”

There’s a lot of watching and waiting going on.

“IBM buying Sun seemed like a mixed bag, but likely a net positive for the community. I think there’s some scepticism that Oracle will step up and become a more active FOSS contributor, but one hopes that Sun’s FOSS commitments will live on after the deal,” Brockmeier said.

Sun’s Open-Source Project List

Here is a list of open-source projects currently in development at Sun.

Project Celeste
Project Celeste is building a distributed, master-less, peer-to-peer, byzantine and fault-tolerant mutable data store made up of nodes in which no single node is responsible for an operation. Nodes are heterogeneous, they come and go arbitrarily, and they participate with other nodes by communicating through a P2P overlay network. This large-scale, distributed storage system is designed to work not only in dedicated data centres but in open and potentially hostile environments such as the Internet.

Project Darkstar
The video game industry’s first business-grade, high-performance, fault-tolerant and highly scalable server technology for online multiplayer games. Written in Java, Project Darkstar has been designed from the ground up to handle almost any kind of online game imaginable.

Electric VLSI Design System
A complete, Java technology-based, circuit design package, that handles schematics, IC layout and even textual hardware description languages.

Project Fortress
A new programming language designed for high-performance computing (HPC) with high programmability. It is intended to be a modern replacement for FORTRAN. The Fortress design has not been tied to legacy language syntax or semantics; all aspects of HPC language design have been rethought from the ground up.

JVoice Bridge
Software written in Java that handles voice over internet protocol (VoIP) audio communication and mixing for tasks such as conference calls, voice chat, speech detection and audio for 3D virtual environments. This versatile software adapts depending on remote user bandwidth connection, and supports a range of voice qualities from telephone to CD-quality.