Contribute towards making a better Java

Do you know that now you too can contribute in developing the next version of Java - Mustang?

Here is your chance.

What is Sun’s motivation?

This definitely isn’t about cost reduction. Our development costs are dominated by the back-end processes: code reviews, integration, test development, release engineering, testing, and long-term maintenance. We expect it will take significant work on the Sun side to mentor contributors and integrate external fixes. Based on other experience, we expect that this project will increase our costs, not lower them. But there are two positive benefits that we believe will outweigh the costs.

First, the platform may benefit from external experience or perspectives that aren’t in our internal team. A striking example of this would be Doug Lea’s work on the JSR 166 Concurrency Utilities package in Tiger. We could have built an equivalent package internally, but Doug’s experience and insight led to a much higher quality result. Using external expertise to improve the J2SE source code seems like a really good thing.

Second, allowing people to contribute fixes and features allows them to vote in the most direct and effective way. We are trying to prioritize both bugs and features across the needs of the whole J2SE community. We do our best to balance the various community needs, but sometimes we may not deliver some change that really matters to someone. If people are really willing to contribute their own time and energy to deliver a high quality fix or feature, then that is something we should accept and encourage.

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