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The Duke of Java is Finally Free Monday 2006-11-13

As rumors buzzed as flies for the last couple of months, Sun has finally announced that it releases its Java implementation under the GNU GPLv2 license.
The Duke is free, free at last. But what does it all mean?

For a long time during the first successful years of Java, many developers urged SUN to submit Java to one or the other of the standards bodies of the world. The intention was to make sure that Java, the platform wouldn’t crash into the non standards diversity, that would make it unusable. But SUN stood firm and demanded that all additions to the platform, and all its implementations should follow the “pure Java” standards set out by SUN.

Microsoft, who licensed Java from SUN, wanted Java to be seen as just another programming language, and made additions to it, that it thought was missing. They did this in violation of the license and after a long legal battle had to pay dearly.

As Java has developed and matured over the years, many Java experts has grown comfortable with SUN:s firm grip on the language and the platform, and have come to believe, this is the way for Java to survive .
So what now? What will happen when Java is GPL’d ? Will it turn as wild as JavaScript or CSS and other web technologies, with a plethora of small differences between implementation, that will drive developers nuts ?

Read this ZDNet article by Martin LaMonica, for more!

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Edit Your Photos Online

Edited

One of the characteristics of the Web 2.0 era, is the fast emergence of net top applications. Making good on the old SUN slogan, “The Net it the computer”, these applications run on some server anywhere on the globe, and only its user interface shows up on the client machine. No need for installation and immediate access from any personal computer or workstation.

One of the more nifty net top applications I’ve run across lately is the pixer.us On Line Photo editor.
It works like this: You upload an image to the server through their client GUI, and when it shows up, you can start editing away to your hearts content. You may crop and resize your image, and you can adjust its color balance, contrast and lightness. You can make it B&W if you like, and you can apply some artistic filtering to make it look like marble or an oil painting.

You can undo your last change or revert to the original, if you do mistakes. Once you are satisfied with your changes, you click the Save button and download the resulting image. You can choose the image format by clicking a button for JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP.

The application GUI is beautiful and very intuitive, so the learning is shot to none. Before you join pixer.us, you can work with a test image. Go ahead and test the pixar.us Online Photo Editor. I had great fun testing the application. From the test image I cropped out one of the girls, saturated the colors a bit and applied the oil painting filter.

The original photo