Re: Free Java, the sequel

[Chris Gray]

On Monday 08 March 2004 23:46, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 19:42, Tom Tromey wrote:
> > Chris> Maybe we should write an open letter to the open letter writers?
> >
> > If only we had some useful distribution channel.  Unfortunately I
> > think it is too late to give a JavaOne talk.
>
> It might be a good idea to express some of our concerns and hopes again
> publicly to people. Although I doubt people who really care don't know
> what the issues are with the way Sun and the JCP keep the main
> proprietary implementation and "standards" under control and out of
> reach of any free software developer. 

I do doubt it.  Some people who care, like Bruce, now (also) know.  A lot of 
people who care a lot about free software hate Java, because they believe it 
is inherently un-free.  A huge amount of people care, but think Java is 
already free because they can download the JDK from Sun's website.  Just look 
at the follow-ups on /..

> Luckily as you said we don't
> really need Sun anymore. And I actually got asked on irc if we really
> have to bother responding and doing "marketing" of our position instead
> of producing more free code and making sure Classpath gets finished :)
>
> That is btw what Bruce Perens told Dalibor and Chris when they explained
> the open letters vs our free runtime environments.
> He literally said: "Keep working on GNU Classpath."
> http://lists.userlinux.com/pipermail/discuss/2004-February/004203.html
>
> > It would be great to get our desires on the agenda though.  This is
> > what Mark was getting at with the "SCSL and FSF" thread a week or so
> > ago...
>
> Sorry for not yet following up on that publicly yet. I said two weeks,
> but I really want to get the 0.08 release out of the way first so I can
> really concentrate on it (any day now!).
>
> I actually started a discussion already about the way util.concurrent ->
> java.util.concurrent (JSR166) worked and how/why cooperation with the
> free systems didn't work out. This is really an interesting case since
> Doug Lea who was the spec lead for that group really worked hard to do
> it all in the open and in a way that the results would hopefully also be
> usable for things outside the JCP/Sun JDK1.5 implementation.
> http://altair.cs.oswego.edu/pipermail/concurrency-interest/2004-March/00088
 >8.html (I also emailed with Doug in private about it already and in the past
> both of us emailed Sun/FSF legal to try to work something out.)

This reads like a textbook case of why Public Domain is not the right way to 
make free software, even if the concept exists in your jurisdiction (SFAICS 
in the countries where Mark and I and many other developers live, the only 
way for a work to go PD is by the passage of time).  IMO a Reference 
Implementation should have a rather liberal licence - the BSD network stack 
and X11 are good examples - but they need to have _something_ in order to 
avoid this kind of hi-jackjng.

Re-visiting the /. threads after an interval of some weeks, I have the 
impression that there is more awareness now Out There of the existence of 
open-source implementations of (various aspects of) Java. So some progress is 
already being made; I just think that we need to do all we can to capitalise 
on this awareness.  Otherwise, IBM's(*) posturing just serves to bolster the 
illusion that there is only one Java show in town, and it's owned by Sun.

(*) And ESR's for that matter.

Cheers

Chris

-- 
Chris Gray                                  /k/ Embedded Java Solutions
Embedded & Mobile Java, OSGi              http://www.kiffer.be/k/
address@hidden                                      +32 3 216 0369