E-Mail to Steve

I can't believe how quickly the number of supports on PetitionSpot.com grew once Rick Ross from DZone posted the link to it on DZone's Twitter feed. My initial goal of 10.000 signatures is not that far away and to be honest, I was more less guessing what a "good number" of supporters would be. Having reached almost 4000 signatures already, I have now written a letter to Steve Jobs and I want to share it with you:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

Apple has recently announced through its Update Release Notes that the JRE/JDK maintained by Apple will be deprecated in future releases of Mac OS.

Apple has done so without giving any hints as to whether any cooperation with Oracle is in place to continue a JRE/JDK-effort for Mac OS.

As you undoubtedly are aware of, Macs have become an increasingly popular platform for “non-Microsoft” software development and the lack of information has therefore caused some concern in the Java Community.

I do, in part, agree with your statement that it may not be ideal for Apple to provide it’s own implementation of a technology owned by another corporation. However, Apple’s developers have so far done a very good job at maintaining a Java Development Kit and Runtime for Mac OS X. In fact, recent updates have always been fairly close after Sun’s (and now Oracle’s) releases.

A couple of days ago I started a simple online petition (http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/macjdk) asking Apple to contribute the Mac OS X-specific parts of its Java implementation to the OpenJDK BSD Port Project (http://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenJDK/BSDPort) and within days I collected thousands of signatures and it is still growing.

The OpenJDK project already has a working implementation of OpenJDK 6 and 7 for Mac OS X, which uses X11 for all the graphical parts. If Apple were to contribute it’s own implementation of the integration bits into Mac OS X, we would no doubt have a very solid Java for Mac which does not have to be maintained by Apple and will stay up to date since OpenJDK is a Oracle- and IBM-backed project to build coming versions of Java.

I believe that Apple supporting OpenJDK (and in particular the BSD Port effort) by contributing relevant parts of the Apple JDK/JRE source code will be mutually beneficial. Java Developers will be able to continue using their existing investments when Java 7 and/or Lion ships and Apple will continue to benefit from a large number of (in my opinion) open minded software engineers that are capable of providing Cocoa-based applications for the growing number of iOS-based devices on the market.

Sincerely,
Daniel Pfeifer

You may also have noticed that I received some constructive criticism on PetitionSpot.com for only mentioning the JDK, when it is in fact the whole lot (JDK/JRE) that is important to us. I have therefore updated the petition slightly ( adding JRE to the text and keeping the original so that nobody can claim I am cheating ;) ).

I also want to once again mention that when you sign the petition on PetitionSpot.com, the site will ask for a donation. The donation is exclusively for the operation of PetitionSpot.com, it is nothing I, Apple or Oracle will receive ( not that Apple or Oracle would need it... ).

Anyway, long story short, thanks for signing the petition and let's hope Steve will listen :)