Re: The Swarm space (was RePast (another agent toolkit) released)

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "MP" == Miles Parker <address@hidden> writes:

MP> As an aside, I do think that there was and has been a history of a
MP> kind of knee-jerk anti-Java bias in parts of the the open-source
MP> *nix world (and by extension, Swam.) 

I think the reason the open-source world wasn't interested in Java was
because of Sun's restrictive SCSL license.  Now you can get source
code for most things, but you still aren't allowed to redistribute
modified versions of Sun's code.  From the perspective of advancing
free software (if that's your goal, obviously), it's important to
1) have good programs to work on, and 2) be able to publish modified
versions of those programs with minimal restriction.

It wasn't until a a year ago or so that there was usable independent Java
virtual machine with library support.  In fact, there still isn't
complete, freely redistributable source code for all of the popular
Java APIs, esp. Swing.

So I think it's potentially misleading to call this "bias", as it is a
reasonable thing for that community to do given the goal of making
freely redistributable, flexible, and technically-strong software.


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