On May 23, 2005, at 9:35 PM, Renaud BECHADE wrote:
＞It would be great if people would bundle Harmony with stuff (and
plan
＞to do it w/ Geronimo when that time comes), bit it's way out of
scope
＞for *this* project to get into the business of reditributing
software
＞from outside of the ASF.
Hum... I still think there is a minimum distribution effort to be
done (call
that marketing if you want) to get people to actually test the VM,
as in the
beginning it might be very, very, very unlikely that absolutely
everything
runs out of the box as replacement for J2SE 5 or 6... So we will
need to
help them try it out.
Yes! And this is classic behavior for OSS projects - once you have
something useful, you go out and proselytize, helping other projects
see the value, and use it.
So you go out and get Eclipse to bundle with it, you get Geronimo to
bundle with it, you get JBoss to bundle with it, you get JOnAS to
bundle with it, you get Tomcat to bundle with it, you get....
And then you learn from their bundling efforts and make the thing
even easier to use in that way.
But distributing Eclipse or JBoss from here? No....
Just think of it in OS terms as a
micro-bootable-live-CD-to-demo-it-actually-works-on-useful-cases (a
stuff
for decision makers). Bundling with 1 or 2 apps we/the ASF did not
write is
not to be covered by NIH syndrome in my opinion, but rather a way
to prove
it actually works to decision makers. (After all, mono bundles mono
with
monodevelop [or rather monodevelop with mono, I think], and Sun
bundles
Netbeans with J2SE...)
I'd prefer we don't re-distribute other people's software unless part
of the distribution for which the Apache project provides top-line
value.
[SNIP]
To come back to more soft-only concerns, IMHO providing
distributors with
the minimum tool they need to polish the VM-to-VM discrepancies and
external
developers the minimum tools they need to test their soft on the
Harmony VM
(and get a chance to actually do something - not just: 'it does not
work' -
if it does not work the way they planned it) might be a big ROI,
comparatively small effort.
That's an entirely different kettle of fish, and I support that.
A VM without the bare minimum support tools might appear a bit
useless to
many people (and also impractical to test with an ergonomic, long-
lasting
experience of beautiful-looking piece of software). If you take,
say, the
FreeBSD case, you don’t have much choice for instance for the VM
you use
with your favorite IDE, so that ipso facto you stick with the VM
you get in
stock (because the other VMs might be good, but if it’s a
nightmare to
reconfigure it all to use your VM of choice with your favorite
IDE...), just
like IE sticks with many win$ users.
I don't understand this argument. If our J2SE implementation is
feature-comparable to the one from Sun, IBM or BEA, why would we need
to add Eclipse onto it?
As a use case, if I want to test a piece of software, well I would
like it
to be kind of "download it and play".
Yes! So we go out there and get everyone to bundle with our J2SE
distribution. We go there, do the work, and help them. :)
geir
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
