Hi Geir, On Sat, 2009-01-17 at 09:53 -0500, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: > What do you think we've been fighting for at the ASF for the last 8 > years, and specifically, the last 2 for the JCK?
I appreciate you trying to fight. And trying to change things from within the JCP. Which is indeed brave. You share that optimism with Dalibor who also always urges to not burn down that which produces bad results and be positive that change can happen. I might have become to cynical with the results not being free, open and community friendly over that many years, that I focus my efforts there where I can actually produce free code in the open. You risk legitimating an institution which doesn't guarantee software freedom without achieving any of your goals. And alienating the community that you say you are fighting for because you hide any talks and results behind the shadowy-cabal that you have become part of. > > If through OpenJDK we can improve the process of producing > > specs, the reference implementation and free test suites, then I am > > all for it. > > You might argue that it's better, because you can get the TCK for use > in OpenJDK and derivatives It is better because it is under terms that allow publishing any code that is tested and/or passes with it under a free software license that guarantees that the source, and not unimportantly, all patent claims must be shared under reciprocal terms, without any restrictions on use for any purpose by any user. That said the current terms are certainly not good enough. Having the TCK as proprietary software is bad, having people cut of from the rest of the community through NDAs is anti-social and not giving anybody the change to test any implementation as you wish is just very unfair and unproductive. > Another view is that they masterfully split the free/libre/open java > community, exploiting long-standing license fault-lines, in order to > counteract the threat that Harmony represented - a quality, performant > open source implementation with an *open, free community* under a > permissive license. We started Harmony to unite the various free java efforts that we were working on in the hope we could also work closer with the Apache community. That it then turned out to split the community with an apache-only effort was never what I, and other founders, like Dalibor and Tom, intended it to be. I am glad Sun talked to the libre-java community before starting their own effort and kept us in the loop about their plans and desires to work together. I am not saying the cooperation is perfect, there is a lot to improve. But we keep talking and trying to work together. Our renewed Fosdem talks cooperation is very indicative of that effort, and I am happy that everybody will take the time again to come and exchange views. > But it didn't work out, mainly because you never could consider > yourself producing software under the AL because of your views towards > "software hoarding" No, creating an alternative code base incompatible with almost all the existing efforts and not considering working together on a shared common interface to all the components that 30 existing runtimes, class libraries, jits, compilers, etc. already were using and working on together was what made the harmony effort fail. I might not like "software hoarding", and I certainly prefer using copyleft licenses that are fairly reciprocal, but being expressly incompatible was what I objected to. Any license that would be compatible with what the exiting communities were using would have been OK. Luckily then the FSF did solve a lot of those issue though by finally upgrading the GPL and making compatibility an explicit goal. Please do reread "Toward a Free Java" http://lwn.net/Articles/184967/ if you don't get what the history is here. > And if you're not providing code, you're providing "air- > cover" by letting them point to openjdk as a model open free software > community. It is an open free software community, even though some derivatives are not fully free software. Something I greatly regret. And you will always see me being very critical of that and help out any alternative effort to work around that. And that works. There has never been any attempt to stifle anybody or any group creating any derivative of the code, whether it be IcedTea as shipped most GNU/Linux distros now, nor any of the other hybrid implementations http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/06/openjdk-hybrids > So whatever problems you see has historical actually exists, and is > still very real and harmful for another group of people with the same > interests and aspirations as you, who managed to actually bring an > independent implementation together to the point of being ready for > compatibility testing. Sure, I know. We had this back in 2005 already: http://advogato.org/person/robilad/diary/64.html And even though Dalibor and Onno pushed for it, we never succeeded back then with 1.5. Keeping chasing after these old issues instead of focusing on the future seems not very productive though. There are indeed still serious issues with non-open specs and anti-social TCK usage restrictions for 1.6 (I would say the processes around them are not really workable right now). But we do have free implementations now. Instead, lets work together on fixing these issues going forward for 1.7, and make sure that we will not just have free code as reference implementation, but also with a fully free community process we all seem to want. Either through the JCP if you feel that can still be saved, or by going around it if it ends up not being able to produce results that are free for all. Cheers, Mark
