Petition to Open Source JavaFX
steveonjava | July 16, 2010At last night’s Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group event, I announced a petition to Open Source the JavaFX Platform. This is a petition from the Java and JavaFX Community directed to the management of Oracle Corporation. The goal of the petition is to increase the viability of the JavaFX platform to the benefit of both the community and Oracle.
To the Leaders, Management, and Board of Directors at Oracle Corporation,
We the undersigned formally request that Oracle Corporation release the entire JavaFX Platform as open source software available for modification and reuse by individuals, educators, and corporations.
…We believe that an essential part of the future success of this platform is to release it as open source software. … In our estimation, the increased adoption of JavaFX will make the platform even more profitable for Oracle than it currently is as a proprietary technology.
This petition has been embraced by community and industry leaders alike. Here are some quotes from leaders in the JavaFX community:
Jim Weaver
JavaFX holds the potential of bringing back rich-client Java, after fifteen years of force-fitting the Web to be an application execution environment. Open-sourcing JavaFX and related deployment technologies will help rescue users and developers from continuing to settle for far less than what could be experienced with rich-client Java.
Peter Pilgrim
JavaFX is still a fantastic solution to be portable, cross-platform, a technology which runs across multiple deployment targets: desktop, mobile and other embedded devices and across multiple operating systems. An Open JavaFX will allow innovation to take place outside of Oracle completely and yet I also believe that the repository, the service / provider owner, intellectual property must be paid or monetised as well. I believe that people, individuals, groups and companies will recognise the work of those who innovate. It is possible to monetise JavaFX.
If you adding your name to the list of signatures, please visit the petition signatory page here:
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Sign the Petition
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JavaFX was first announced three years ago at JavaOne 2007. We would like to be able to present this petition to the management of Oracle at JavaOne on the 3rd event anniversary of this great technology.
Please opening.
I think that Java Fx have a lot of potential, but, is complicated his compilation mode.
In 1997, I changed all my development work from Visual Basic to Java. For nearly 13 years everything I did was in java and I was an evangelist, committed to the ideas that java espoused, even when I was angry about one or another of it’s implementation details.
I supported Oracle, even with all the MySQL stuff that was going around last year. I felt that Monte had sold his company and didn’t have any right to complain about what happened to it. I felt I had to keep the same attitude about Sun’s sale and Oracle’s stewardship of java. I was prepared for changes, but not prepared for one thing.
Oracle sued Google over java.
I’m not foolish enough to think that Oracle will ever bother suing me, but this act was absolute proof that they have no motivation other than short term monetary gain. There is no way in the world that they are going to spend money on helping developers when they can simply do a withdrawal at the Patent ATM machine. Serious development of java/javaFX as a platform is over in my opinion.
I am in the process of re-writing my core java applications in C#/Mono now. I don’t anticipate ever going back to java or javaFX, even for all the promise they have brought over the years.
While I’m really glad that there are people like you who still have so much optimism for the future, I’m afraid I can’t share in it. Even if you somehow manage to convince Oracle to “Open Source” javaFX, you can be sure it will be full of loopholes that will allow Oracle to sue anyone they don’t like. I really hope that one day I’ll have to say “You were right and I was wrong”, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
morris