After years-long speculations, Oracle has finally disclosed its plans of open sourcing Java EE 8. The company is shifting the latest Java Enterprise Edition to an open source foundation at the time of launching the v8.0.
Oracle has maintained the open source Java project for years, but there were recently some complaints that the company is shifting the Java EE engineering team on other projects. Oracle had eventually restated its commitment to support Java EE last year. However, the Java community has so far been demanding the company to run the project independently.
David Delabassee, the software evangelist, at Oracle has published a blog post announcing company’s decision. “Although Java EE is developed in open source with the participation of the Java EE community, often the process is not seen as being agile, flexible or open enough, particularly when compared to other open source communities,” said Delabassee.
Enhanced agility and flexible licensing
Moving Java EE core technologies, reference implementations and test compatibility kit to an open source foundation will help the company to adopt more agile processes and implement flexible licensing. The change in the governance process is certainly quite important for a widely adopted project like Java EE.
In the official blog post, Delabassee says that Oracle will encourage innovation by taking a hands-off approach for Java EE. This step will create a positive move that will benefit the entire Enterprise Java community.
Java EE 8 is yet to launch; the version was originally supposed to be debuted at JavaOne in 2016. However, it has now been suggested that the new Java EE will be released sometime later this year. Oracle’s Delabassee even hints that specifications of Java EE 8 are almost completed.
