VirtualBox 4.2.0 Beta 1

VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.

Some of the features of VirtualBox are:

Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don't have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox.

Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.

Open Source HPC Language Project Started under Sun, Oracle winding it down

Oracle researchers are "winding down" development of the Fortress programming language for high-performance computing, an effort started nearly 10 years ago by Sun Microsystems.

Fortress was meant to provide a superior alternative to the well-established Fortran language for HPC. It is also among a number of languages that received financial support from the US DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) High Productivity Computing Systems program.

"Ten years is a remarkably long run for an industrial research project (one to three years is much more typical), but we feel that our extended effort has been worthwhile," well-known computer scientist and Fortress project architect Guy Steele said in a blog post on Saturday. "Many aspects of the Fortress design were novel, and we learned a great deal from building an interpreter and an initial set of libraries."

However, the project faced "severe technical challenges" during the past few years, according to Steele. The issues revolved around "the mismatch between the (rather ambitious) Fortress type system and a virtual machine not designed to support it (that would be every currently available VM, not just [the Java VM]," he wrote.

Team members decided there wasn't enough research value in finishing an implementation of Fortress compatible with the JVM, he added.

"We also note that, over the last ten years, other languages (Chapel, X10, Clojure, and Scala, among others) have explored some of the same issues that Fortress has addressed, and we have very much enjoyed conversations, collaboration, and friendly competition with those who have explored these ideas in alternative contexts," Steele said.

Work on Fortress is going to be gradually stopped over the next few months as team members get "the code and language specification into the best shape that we can," Steele added. The codebase will still be open-source and Oracle's Programming Language Research Group will answer queries about it.

The writing may have been on the wall for Fortress as far back as November 2006, when DARPA stopped funding its development. But work on the language continued at Sun and Oracle, which completed the acquisition of Sun in early 2010.

News of Fortress' pending draw-down drew a mixture of disappointment and shrugging acceptance from programmers posting on social media sites.

"Oracle would keep it alive for...what, exactly," one poster said in a Reddit thread. "Sometimes neat languages never get traction, and throwing good money after bad won't help matters."

"It's a project that is going nowhere (a lot of people in this thread have never even heard of it)," another wrote. "Surely they can put someone like Guy Steele to work on something that is more likely to succeed."

They say "May the Best win". Google wins patent fight with Oracle

Judge William Alsup has become The Decider in what could become a landmark case in software intellectual property.

Chances are there might not be another lawsuit involving open source licensing and application programming interfaces for a long while. They're just too darn difficult to argue, explain and win.

Juries of regular people, by and large, do not understand the software development process and its licensing business, nor should they be expected to do so. They are peers to IT professionals as persons, but not as professionals. A case the nature of Oracle v. Google, which has been in the news for two months and has the potential to be a landmark case, would have been better served by a qualified jury that knows this topic.

But because that would open a can of worms in the U.S. court system that nobody even wants to consider, the courts proceed in the conventional manner.

Google Wins Second Round
Oracle learned firsthand, and the hard way, that it isn't such a simple proposition to nail a forker of open source software to the legal cross. In the closely watched Oracle v. Google trial on May 23, Google and the open source community logged into the record a solid legal victory when a 12-person jury unanimously found Google not guilty of infringing on two of Oracle's Java patents.

As my colleague Darryl K. Taft reported here in eWEEK, the jury found that Google did not infringe on the two Java patents that Oracle had asserted in the case—U.S. Patent No. RE38,104 and U.S. Patent No. 6,061,520.

The judge in the case, William Alsup, has dismissed the jury, but he still must decide on leftover issues from the copyright phase of the trial. Alsup said he would come to that determination within a week.

Those leftover issues involve Google's so-called "fair use" of the Java APIs. And they are very important. Turns out the jury of regular people couldn't agree as to whether Google overstepped its bounds in forking Java to help build its popular Android mobile device operating system a few years ago.

The truth, however, is this: Java has been forked hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in its 17-year history, by many developers. But those developers haven't been sued by a huge company with many lawyers like Oracle, either.

Forking Forgoes "Pure Java"
When Java gets changed for a specific purpose, it then forgoes the label "Pure Java" and is disowned by Oracle's Java franchise. No support, no updates, no nothing -- you're on your own. But it's still Java, it delivers code across the Internet, and it gets the job done most of the time.

That was the whole idea back in the early '90s, when Dr. James Gosling and his Sun Microsystems band of developers created the now-ubiquitous programming language. Gosling his gang designed Java as a key link to connect what he called "Big Hunk" servers to desktops, to cars, to mobile devices, to TVs -- to basically anything.

When Sun released Java to the open source community in 2006, it was not only a gift to the world, but it also was a nod to the fact that Java had already been copied and forked thousands of times in 11 years.

Java is so everywhere in the Internet, moving code from place to place and activating applications, that it has became an integral part of the infrastructure background, like XML or TCP/IP. It's just there, it works, and it keeps on working 24/7.

Java Taken for Granted?
Java is easy to take for granted, and Oracle knows it. It is simply trying to protect what it owns; it's just very difficult to prove negligence against a competitor when it comes to open source and APIs.

Java's APIs are the central issue in this trial. APIs are a combination of several components: software, instructions, best practices and techniques. And techniques are not copyrightable, so that begs the question: Are APIs in their entirely copyrightable?

That was the core of Oracle's case against Google. The jurors couldn't agree. So this now goes to The Decider: Judge Alsup.

Google and Oracle have both won parts of this case, but it isn't over until the judge sings. Even then, appeals may come into the picture. It's an important case.

Engine Yard is Teaming with Red Hat on JRuby

Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo will continue their work on JRuby at Red Hat.

Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo, key developers behind the JRuby project, are joining Red Hat. The news was announced at JRubyConf 2012 this morning and later confirmed by Nutter on Twitter.

JRuby is an open source implementation of the Ruby programming language that targets the Java virtual machine (JVM). It allows the popular Ruby on Rails framework to be used in a Java environment and interoperate with Java code. JRuby offers better performance than the standard C-based Ruby reference implementation in some cases.

Nutter and Enebo were hired by Sun in 2006 to work on JRuby full-time. When Oracle’s acquisition of Sun created uncertainty about the future of JRuby in 2009, they left the company and went to work for Ruby hosting provider Engine Yard. The two remained with Engine Yard until now. Alongside the revelation that Nutter and Enebo are joining Red Hat, Engine Yard announced that it has partnered with the Linux vendor and will continue to support the advancement of JRuby.

Red Hat jumped into the Java middleware market with its 2006 acquisition of JBoss. The company has become a major Java stakeholder and has made considerable investments in Java technology. This makes Red Hat a good fit for employing the leading JRuby contributors. The Linux distributor has a longstanding commitment to open development and will likely be a good steward for the project.

An interesting bit of language stuck out in the announcement. In addition to JRuby, the two developers will also be working on "JVM languages" at Red Hat. I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a connection to Red Hat’s intriguing Ceylon project, an effort by Hibernate creator Gavin King to create a new language that will run the Java virtual machine. Red Hat certainly seems to be interested in expanding the JVM as a platform.

Amid the legal maze, Oracle looks to extend copyright

If the US court decides APIs can be copyrighted, a bizarre two-tier global software development environment would be created

PITY THE 12 jurors engrossed in the labyrinthine patent and damages trial brought by Oracle over Google’s use of programming language Java in its Android operating system.

They’ve been subjected to weeks of arcane and convoluted details on how code is developed, on programming, on copyright, on patents, on open-source software. The judge himself appeared baffled at times with the complexity and conflicting accounts of engineers, lawyers and management, including the chief executives of both firms. How much worse for the jurors, who must decide on the core issues in the trial.

You could only sympathise with them when they decided last week that they would only part-decide on some of the key points. On May 7th they gave a semi-victory of sorts to Oracle (though both sides were claiming a win). But there’s more to come, and determinations are looming that could have worrying implications for software developers.

The question of how Java may be used by developers is at the heart of this lawsuit.

Oracle took possession of Java when it acquired Sun Microsystems. Versatile Java is ubiquitous on computing devices, from computers to mobile handsets, enabling applications to run in numerous operating system environments.

Google developers used Java in Android. Oracle sued Google, arguing that Google failed to license the use of Java and, therefore, Oracle would like a hefty $1 billion in damages. Google argued that Java had been an open-source platform for years, that it had the right to use it freely, and so owes nothing.

Those are the easy bits to understand. The devil is in the detail. The trial has offered some amusing moments, such as Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison not knowing whether Java is free. Then there are the duelling slide sets – Google and Oracle publicly posted tit-for-tat slide presentations, full of revealing internal emails. Having waded through all this, the jury decided last week that Google did infringe Oracle copyright on 37 APIs – application programming interfaces, a programming tool – and also on nine lines of Android code. But it also decided that Oracle couldn’t go after that $1 billion jackpot.

However, it couldn’t decide whether Google could use a “fair use” argument for Java – that it is entitled to use some portions in the creation of something new, without needing to pay for a licence.

Although there are other questions still to be determined, such as whether some Sun patents were “wilfully infringed”, as Oracle argues, or whether Google developers created code in ignorance of the patents, the copyright question eventually must be returned to by Judge William Alsup. This bit makes many US developers nervous – the issue of whether APIs, the bits of code that let software programs communicate with each other, and hence enable developers to create third-party programs that can plug into another piece of software, can be copyrighted, as Oracle argues.

APIs have never been copyrightable before, because they are not considered to be a creative invention, but simply a list of code elements that enable one piece of software to connect to another piece of software.

If APIs can be copyrighted, the relationship developers have with the companies they develop third-party software for could change. Potentially, developers would now need to pay for or gain permission to use APIs.

Critics argue such a situation is untenable and would stifle invention. At the very least, developers would find it more awkward and costly to create software. Suppliers of cloud services could also find themselves in a challenging position if major cloud providers such as Amazon could copyright its cloud APIs, regulating access to the cloud.

Meanwhile, in a timely ruling, the European Court of Justice determined last week that APIs can’t be copyrighted in Europe, stating, “To accept that the functionality of a computer program can be protected by copyright would amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development.”

If the US court decides APIs can be copyrighted, a bizarre, two-tier global software development environment would be created, in which US internet companies would likely be at a significant disadvantage, and Europe would be a far more attractive location for cloud service providers and software development.

Oracle ADF Faces Goes Open Source

Oracle is pleased to announce the donation of ADF Faces, a rich set of UI components based on the JavaServer Faces specification, to the Apache Software Foundation. This donation will be licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. What this project will be called in the future will soon be determined by the Apache MyFaces community. By supporting JSF and MyFaces Oracle is hoping that more vendors are going to join and strengthen the Faces community. This is going to give a boost to the JavaServer Faces technology as well as the MyFaces project. The donated code comes with great functionality out of the box such as: file upload support, client-side validation, partial rendering of a page (AJAX-style), data tables, hierarchical tables, color/date pickers, progress indicators, menu tabs/buttons, internationalization and accessibility. This donation starts with more than 100 components which have already been thoroughly tested and come with high quality documentation.