On Jul 22, 2005, at 7:59 PM, Mark Wielaard wrote:
Hi,
On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 10:18 +0100, Tim Ellison wrote:
It seems that all roads lead back to the discussion of licensing and
philosophy. Even that has degenerated into name calling which is
unhelpful for building a harmonious and inclusive community.
While I understand perfectly that unifying the existing efforts in
J2SE-space is a goal of Harmony, I believe we need more visibility on
this list of the progress and successes in this space. Without such
visibility we appear to be going in circles, and many people who
initially expressed great interest in the project will walk away.
Thanks for trying to move forward with a positive message.
I was indeed about to give up, not really because I personally feel
excluded, but because we seem to completely fail to reach out to the
50/80 people working on the existing free efforts. And I cannot do it
without the support of these people. They have worked for years on all
aspects of what Harmony wants to do. They are very bright, smart
people.
And they are clearly proud that things like Tomcat, Eclipse, Jonas,
Lucene, Axis, etc and all those other large free programs actually
work
now on the free systems. The community around harmony seems to
sometimes
dismiss some of this work. And I do feel we won't have a healthy
community if we cannot bridge the gap with all those existing hackers
(some of which already work on all this stuff full time).
I don't think we dismiss this work - after all, we worked hared to
make sure that these communities were part of the start, and we're
working to chance standard apache policy to accommodate them (the
list policy, for example...)
Some of the people around the GNU Classpath projects really don't
feel that they are part of Harmony. And I do try to bring them in. But
when some of these people tried to get a feeling how/what people
thought
about what they have been working on for the last few years there
wasn't
any real technical feedback. The only feedback given is that it wasn't
distributed under the Apache License. Which a lot of people
interpreted
as being offensive and hostile.
IIRC, that wasn't in any way a community sentiment. I certainly wish
you would distribute under the AL :) but I respect your decision to
choose the license under which you wish to work.
My mistake was that I kind of tried to
show (probably too aggressively) how annoying and uncooperative
that is.
Almost every existing project has a problem with the Apache License
just
because it isn't compatible with the GPL. This is infuriating (to both
sides!).
I don't believe I got my point across and I believe people now
think it
is all about licensing. But it really was about dismissing (not
properly
investigating) the work already done this last decade by other free
software groups. And those groups do have some really nice ideas in
their designs. And it is backed up with real free code and real free
runtimes on very different platforms that use it. And from working
with
these people for some years now I know they like comparing and
discussing technical details. Show their own strengths were they
can and
cooperate on common code when it makes sense.
Well, lets be fair here. I think that the VM/classlib interface is
important and a good place to start discussions. I used "the work
already done this last decade by other free software groups" - namely
the GNU Classpath VM interface - as a starting point.
You have to give me credit - not only didn't I ignore it, I used it
as the basic starting point.
I did offer criticism, as I felt that extending java.lang was
problematic for both engineering reasons as well as legal ones, and I
seem to recall both dismissed out of hand. I'd like to put that
behind us and keep going, now that we have more good ideas and
experience through Tim and Graeme.
Please investigate what people have been working on all these
years, and
please give real technical feedback. Maybe the designs of Kaffe, GCJ,
IKVM, JCVM, JamVM, JikesRVM, SableVM, JNode, Kissme, CACAO, etc. are
really bad. And maybe they are really completely unportable to
different
systems/platforms. But if so then I am sure the designers would
like to
know about that. Lets try to engage them into a discussion.
At the same time, I encourage getting real technical feedback FROM
those people too :)
And there are often interface design discussions on the classpath
mailinglist, please monitor that list
(http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/).
Andrew Hughes really worked hard to document our current interfaces as
now published with the latest GNU Classpath release at:
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/docs/vmintegration.html
Please discuss what seems impractical in this design for adoption
of GNU
Classpath as core library set.
Any chance of making them available under Mit/X license? ;)
geir
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
