On Monday 08 March 2004 23:46, Mark Wielaard wrote: > Hi, > > On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 19:42, Tom Tromey wrote: > > Chris> Maybe we should write an open letter to the open letter writers? > > > > If only we had some useful distribution channel. Unfortunately I > > think it is too late to give a JavaOne talk. > > It might be a good idea to express some of our concerns and hopes again > publicly to people. Although I doubt people who really care don't know > what the issues are with the way Sun and the JCP keep the main > proprietary implementation and "standards" under control and out of > reach of any free software developer.
I do doubt it. Some people who care, like Bruce, now (also) know. A lot of people who care a lot about free software hate Java, because they believe it is inherently un-free. A huge amount of people care, but think Java is already free because they can download the JDK from Sun's website. Just look at the follow-ups on /.. > Luckily as you said we don't > really need Sun anymore. And I actually got asked on irc if we really > have to bother responding and doing "marketing" of our position instead > of producing more free code and making sure Classpath gets finished :) > > That is btw what Bruce Perens told Dalibor and Chris when they explained > the open letters vs our free runtime environments. > He literally said: "Keep working on GNU Classpath." > http://lists.userlinux.com/pipermail/discuss/2004-February/004203.html > > > It would be great to get our desires on the agenda though. This is > > what Mark was getting at with the "SCSL and FSF" thread a week or so > > ago... > > Sorry for not yet following up on that publicly yet. I said two weeks, > but I really want to get the 0.08 release out of the way first so I can > really concentrate on it (any day now!). > > I actually started a discussion already about the way util.concurrent -> > java.util.concurrent (JSR166) worked and how/why cooperation with the > free systems didn't work out. This is really an interesting case since > Doug Lea who was the spec lead for that group really worked hard to do > it all in the open and in a way that the results would hopefully also be > usable for things outside the JCP/Sun JDK1.5 implementation. > http://altair.cs.oswego.edu/pipermail/concurrency-interest/2004-March/00088 >8.html (I also emailed with Doug in private about it already and in the past > both of us emailed Sun/FSF legal to try to work something out.) This reads like a textbook case of why Public Domain is not the right way to make free software, even if the concept exists in your jurisdiction (SFAICS in the countries where Mark and I and many other developers live, the only way for a work to go PD is by the passage of time). IMO a Reference Implementation should have a rather liberal licence - the BSD network stack and X11 are good examples - but they need to have _something_ in order to avoid this kind of hi-jackjng. Re-visiting the /. threads after an interval of some weeks, I have the impression that there is more awareness now Out There of the existence of open-source implementations of (various aspects of) Java. So some progress is already being made; I just think that we need to do all we can to capitalise on this awareness. Otherwise, IBM's(*) posturing just serves to bolster the illusion that there is only one Java show in town, and it's owned by Sun. (*) And ESR's for that matter. Cheers Chris -- Chris Gray /k/ Embedded Java Solutions Embedded & Mobile Java, OSGi http://www.kiffer.be/k/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] +32 3 216 0369 _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath
