To pre-empt a lot of poorly informed comments... [LWN.net]

To pre-empt a lot of poorly informed comments...

Posted May 9, 2005 15:25 UTC (Mon) by sab39 (guest, #2185)
Parent article: A proposal for a free Java implementation

The authors of the announcement have admitted that it was poorly worded.

The intention is apparently not to compete with GNU Classpath and the other efforts but to attempt to identify ways in which both existing code and new, as-yet-unwritten code can be brought together under a common umbrella to provide a complete replacement for the J2SE stack.

There are licensing difficulties to work out and it isn't 100% certain yet that GNU Classpath will be used, but despite appearances there seems to be a lot of goodwill on both sides of the fence in an attempt to avoid duplication of effort.

The harmony effort could be considered slightly redundant - Kaffe and GCJ seem to cover a lot of the ground it's aiming to tackle - but it isn't as bad as the announcement makes it appear. It looks like there is an excellent likelihood that Harmony will become another part of the existing community of projects using (and contributing back to) GNU Classpath, and both sides will benefit.

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To pre-empt a lot of poorly informed comments...

Posted May 9, 2005 15:41 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

>> There are licensing difficulties to work out and it isn't 100% certain yet that GNU Classpath will be used

But you are just glossing over this topic like the original posters have. Specifically, what are the issues with Classpath involvement? This is the crux of the matter because using Classpath means you might see something released from this project in 2006. Not using Classpath means you will be waiting at least until 2008, because this is a lot of work with a lot of conformance testing and not everyone who works on Classpath is simply going to jump ship and add their expertise to this new project.

But as I have already said, this project along with the Perl6 project are just growing the Python developer base.

To pre-empt a lot of poorly informed comments...

Posted May 9, 2005 16:37 UTC (Mon) by sab39 (guest, #2185) [Link]

It does seem that there's a lot of uncertainty over exactly what the licensing issues are and how serious they are.

However, there has been an explicit promise by the Classpath developers that they WILL make clarifications to their license as necessary to alleviate the Apache group's concerns.

And there have been promises from the Apache people to identify and clarify their exact problems with the license in order to figure out exactly what clarifications, if any, are necessary.

In other words, the chances of NOT using Classpath are pretty slim. There's always the chance that there could turn out to be some major roadblock in the details of what Apache wants from the Classpath developers, but at the moment both sides are saying the right things (except in the announcement which has been apologized for). There are no plans at this point to start a new project from scratch redoing what Classpath already did. They're leaving that option open in case it turns out to be impossible to reach an agreement with the Classpath developers. But it's unlikely, since everyone recognizes how stupid and painful that would be.