Hi,
I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Jim Pick. I have volunteered to take over the reigns of the kaffe project from it's original author, Tim Wilkinson. I've been following Kaffe's progress since about the time I first got involved in free software (around 1996). In the past, I've been an active Debian maintainer, and I also ran LinuxHQ.com, KernelNotes.org, and Kernel.org for a while, amongst other things. I know Tim quite well, as I moved to Berkeley, California (from Canada) to work with him and Peter Mehlitz at Transvirtual about two years ago. Tim is currently involved in the process of starting a new company, having left Transvirtual at the end of November last year. I still work at Transvirtual though, and I'm still good friends with Tim (we usually meet for coffee in the mornings). It was during one of those morning coffees that I asked Tim what was happening with Kaffe.org, and whether or not he was planning to do any more work on it. As I suspected, he stated that he really doesn't have time to do anymore work on it (especially since he no longer works at Transvirtual). He stated that he'd be happy if I took it over. I also checked with the new CEO of Transvirtual, Chris Herron, and Peter Mehlitz, if it was OK with them if I did some work to try to get the Kaffe.org project moving again, and they thought it was a good idea and were very supportive. I've announced my intentions to the core team, and they all seemed OK with the idea -- I asked if anybody else wanted the job, but there were no takers. So I guess I've got the go ahead to do this. :-) I've also taken over development of Transvirtual's internal, proprietary version of Kaffe (now called KaffePro), so I'm in the situation where I can spend a lot of time thinking about JVM implementations. :-) Anyways, here's what I'm planning to do: 1) Setup a new machine and website for kaffe.org, so everything can be centralized on one site. Transvirtual has donated a machine and rackspace for it, and I've already set it up. I've already moved the DNS and the ftp site onto it. The current website is looking pretty old and out-of-date, so I'm going to replace it with something simpler. I'm hoping I can get the CVS archive from Ean Schuessler at Brainfood so I can set it up on the new machine. Also, down the road, it would be nice to migrate the mailing list to the new machine so Daniel Veillard doesn't have to maintain it. I thought about using SourceForge, but I decided against it. 2) Make a new release as soon as possible. Version 1.0.6 came out in July, 2000, and there hasn't been a release since (although there has been CVS activity). I'd like to do a minimal amount of testing, and see if we can get it out, perhaps as early as next week. 3) Clarify the relationship between Transvirtual and Kaffe.org. As a long-time kaffe-watcher, I would like to see Kaffe.org be a very open project, which incorporates code from, and interoperates with all the other free virtual machine projects out there. I definitely see Kaffe.org as being an independent project that isn't controlled by Transvirtual. Transvirtual is willing to donate time and code to the project to make it successful. On the other hand, it would be best if everybody was comfortable with the fact that my employer is actively developing a proprietary version of kaffe, called KaffePro, which is designed to address the needs of the commercial market for clean room Java virtual machine implementations. As a commercial software company built on developing Intellectual Property, Transvirtual needs to be selective about what it does and does not contribute to the project. You can expect that Transvirtual won't hold back bug fixes from the free version, and will not prevent others from contributing to the project. Transvirtual, as a company, was founded with Kaffe as it's primary product, so you can expect to see Transvirtual continue to use, maintain and protect the Kaffe trademark for it's own purposes. It is important to Transvirtual that Kaffe.org is successful, but also that it is clear to the public that Kaffe.org's JVM implementation is separate from Transvirtual's KaffePro product, even though they share a common heritage. (whew, glad that's over, I'm afraid I was starting to sound like a lawyer) 4) Start active development on a new major release of kaffe. I've got a lot of ideas for what should be done with it. But I'll discuss those separately because I'd like to see some contributions and some debate. :-) Anyways, this email has been long enough. I'm looking forward to working on kaffe and Kaffe.org - it should be fun! Cheers, - Jim p.s. If you're reading this, and you're going to JavaOne this year in San Francisco, let's get together for beers. :-)