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Comment by cakeface | Hacker News Reader

I realize that there are some actual technical questions here but I can't help but be fascinated by the politics of this.

Are IBM and RedHat just against Jigsaw because of commercial interests in JBoss Modules and OSGI? Do they actually care about the technical merits? How can Oracle get to this point in the process without more buy in from the community?

Also I never knew who was part of the EC. Interesting breakdown on who voted for or against.

Will Java 9 go out without Jigsaw? I imagine if they have already modularized the JDK then it's impossible to release Java 9 without Jigsaw.

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The biggest concerns are the lack of thought put into build tooling and breakage of existing code. Jigsaw as it is now seems to have been primarily designed to split the JDK up and was pushed into a language-wide module system without enough thought put into the requirements for such functionality.

I don't think anyone is against JPMS solely because they prefer OSGI, etc., but because it can require dramatic changes to the way these systems work (if it can even keep them working at all).

Java 9 will likely ship with Jigsaw in some fashion, at worst it will be limited to the core JRE/JDK libraries themselves.

Given the detail of the post RH put up, and the fact that many companies that aren't RH also voted against, I think the onus is on the claimant to demonstrate that politics are in fact involved. I disagree with a lot of what RH does, have no stake in any voting party, but unambiguously think Jigsaw can not go forward in its current state.

Releasing the JDK9 without Jigsaw enabled is not a major problem.

"I think the onus is on the claimant to demonstrate that politics are in fact involved."

When has there ever been a technical decision made on the technical merits?

It's always politics. Scratch that. It's only politics.

Pieter Hintjens' telling of how RedHat spiked the process around AMQP shows that RedHat is no different from any other player. http://hintjens.com/blog:125#toc15

I had a brief flirtation with a standardization effort. Standards bodies are just another battlefield for belligerents. And I have no problem with that.

By that logic, literally anything Red Hat does is intrinsically bad. I did misspeak: I'll happily believe there is some politics, but that's not what I meant to say; the claim elsewhere is that it's purely or primarily politics.

I've already argued that simply reducing it to "it's politics" is not a reasonable argument unless you can also explain why the RH technical detail post is really just a bunch of politics and not technical arguments, and if you can explain why all of these organizations that don't own a module system _also_ voted against.

"anything Red Hat does is intrinsically bad"

Not at all. I'm saying that politics is normal and good. I want RedHat, IBM, Oracle, etc to fight it out. Legally.

Before replying, I took a step back, wondering what my position is. Here it is:

This modules effort feels like generics. JDK 1.5 adopted the least objectionable, and therefore least useful, design for generics. The rationalization was "backward compatibility", then and now. The correct answer was to retool the JVM and JDK as needed to do generics properly.

IMHO, Java has leaned too far towards backward compatibility. But what do I know? Java continues to do quite well, despite my objections.

re: feels like generics. Quite right. From Spec Lead, Mark Reinhold: https://youtu.be/fxB9cVNcyZo?t=41m50s

> unambiguously

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I appreciate it's not the best choice of words, but I'm an ESL, and there is certainly no ambiguity in my thoughts that Jigsaw is a bad idea and can't move forward as is.

> I'm an ESL

In that case, you're doing very well indeed. I wouldn't have quoted The Princess Bride (watch it!) if I'd known.

Us foreign English-speakers, on occasion, do watch good movies. It's okay.

s/unambiguously/unequivocally/g

> How can Oracle get to this point in the process without more buy in from the community?

Not trying to be snarky, but you've never worked with Oracle, have you? Their modus operandi is to literally make whatever it is they want, then kick it out the door and tell everyone: look at what we did, deal with it. They have absolutely no idea how to collaborate. With partners or customers. They've had 20+ years of "our way or the highway". The house Larry built.

well, but the java folks at Oracle are all old Sun people and they are a lot different than Oracle-Oracle people.

Are they really still there?

Yes.

The Java folks have no more control of corporate policy than the Solaris folks did. You're fooling yourself if you think they've got any control whatsoever.

Did those Java folks also decide to start extorting customers?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java...

If the answer is yes - then they're no better than the Oracle folks they work for. If the answer is no, then they clearly have no say in what REALLY happens when it comes to Oracle's decision making.

How are they extorting customers ?

They made their implementation of Java a commercial product and have been supporting OpenJDK for those that don't want to purchase it. They are are well within their right to sue companies who are illegally using a commercial product without a license. Just like Microsoft et al regularly sues companies who are pirating their software.

And no the developers who are responsible for Java are not lawyers in their spare time.

Oracle is suing companies that explicitly enable commercial features of its commercial JVM. Next up: Microsoft broke my "free" copy of Windows XP, are they evil? /s

I don't have direct experience of this, but the general accusation I see is that companies hire Oracle to set up their systems, and Oracle's own people swear on a stack of bibles that the setup is in compliance, but behind the scenes they'll have enabled things that require more expensive licenses, and which Oracle knows are enabled and knows they can come back to shake you down for (sorry, "audit") later on.

Stop talking nonsense. Oracle is a massive company.

There are different groups with different cultures especially since many of them arrived through acquisitions. Including the Java team which came from Sun.

This. I used to work at IBM, and I can't tell you how many different (mutually inconsistent) narratives about "how IBM is".

Yeah I'm really wondering how they got to this point, weeks away from release, and suddenly everyone realizes that Java modules have serious technical issues. Smells like 100% politics.

Not a lot of people have played with Jigsaw: it is hardly a thing you can play with in an afternoon. For those of us who have played with JDK9, it was pretty clear that this would be disastrous for a while. The continuous delay of Jigsaw is a good hint about how much impact it has.

If the fact they do it at this point is evidence of politics, can you explain why saying exactly the same thing much sooner would not have been? Jigsaw hasn't been in a state that most people can go try it for very long -- and most people are the folks who are impacted the most (for reasons the RH blog post explains).

Finally: it's not like Red Hat blocked this. A majority of stakeholders did, and most of them don't own module systems.

> Not a lot of people have played with Jigsaw: it is hardly a thing you can play with in an afternoon.

Presumably the people voting on it have.

> can you explain why saying exactly the same thing much sooner would not have been?

Because letting it get this far (weeks? from release) and then suddenly objecting loudly seems a little fishy versus bringing up technical objections years ago when there would be adequate time to address them?

This is not the first time those people have complained about Jigsaw by any stretch; it is the first time it has come to a vote and people felt it was worth to summarize the arguments. Oracle didn't even think Jigsaw was ready for a long time, which is why it didn't _even come to a vote previously_ and has delayed Java 9 by months. The release cycle was supposed to be 2 years, and Jigsaw is the only reason it isn't.

Jigsaw has been a project for... a decade? now. That isn't a consequence of easy consensus.

It is the first time people who aren't voting, Java programmers, could realistically try Jigsaw.

On 2017-05-03 Red Hat voted No with the following comment: Red Hat is voting NO on this JSR. The Red Hat middleware team, other members of the EC and Java community members, have mentioned publicly and in more detail our concerns (here https://developer.jboss.org/blogs/scott.stark/2017/04/14/cri... and here https://developer.jboss.org/servlet/JiveServlet/download/38-...). We have also discussed with our own OpenJDK team, which made good counter arguments to several of the concerns, but in the end we believe a NO vote is the correct course of action. In previous votes and comments on the EG list we have articulated the view that from a middleware/SE developer perspective we believe that Jigsaw does not fulfil its original goals of being a module system which can be used by the likes of Java EE. We understand that after inception the original goals of the EG were initially changed to try to focus it on a module system to be used solely to modularise the JVM and that caused some architecture and implementation approaches which made it difficult for it to be a module system to be used by SE and EE developers. Unfortunately during the lifetime of the EG the goal appeared to switch back to trying to make it a module system for Java developers but previous implementation decisions appear not to have been revisited or could not be changed and as a result the expectations around Jigsaw have not been met by the implementation. Therefore, we are worried about the impact of the current implementation on the wider Java community, particularly existing projects and products including, but also beyond, Java EE. We have raised several issues within the EG list to try to rectify a few of these things in what we believe would have been a minimally invasive manner but they have been rejected. Furthermore, we believe that there has been insufficient consensus in the EG for a series of changes so dramatic to the JVM and which could have an equally dramatic impact on the Java communities, as well as a lack of openness on receiving and discussing community input. We believe that a more considered evaluation of all input and consensus gathering should not take too much time and would result in something which would be better received by the entire Java ecosystem.

Are IBM and RedHat just against Jigsaw because of commercial interests in JBoss Modules and OSGI?

It's been a while since I touched JBoss, but at one time they had gone wholesale for OSGI as their module system (replacing their old homegrown system built on JMX). Have they since replaced OSGI with something else?

They have since ripped out any kind of OSGi support. They wrote their own module system [1]. It's basically their very fancy way set up their own class loaders. As far as class loader frameworks go it's one of the best out there, IMHO the best of any Java server or container. It gives you non-hierarchical class loading and is fully parallel capable. Applications in general don't have to deal with it unless they want to tweak class loading. Only extensions to JBoss/WildFly itself have to deal with it, mostly it's just XML descriptors.

[1] https://github.com/jboss-modules/jboss-modules

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