Open Source Java? Already done. [LWN.net]

Open Source Java? Already done.

Posted Jun 24, 2005 15:43 UTC (Fri) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216)
In reply to: Microsoft Puts Roadblock in Front of Open-Sourcing Avalon and Indigo (eWeek) by frankie
Parent article: Microsoft Puts Roadblock in Front of Open-Sourcing Avalon and Indigo (eWeek)

Open Source Software Java? Already done for many purposes. Red Hat Fedora Core 4 ships with gcj (Java compiler), GNU Classpath (Core libraries), and OpenOffice 2 and Eclipse running on them. There's still work to do, but the train has already left the station.

The real problem now is that many people don't realize how far OSS/FS Java has gotten. I talked to many of the key developers at FISL, and was amazed at (1) how much has been accomplished and (2) how hard it is to learn that information. I tried to help the key developers understand what the rest of us wanted to know, and capture that; you can get a hint of that in my FISL travelogue, and I expect that SouJava will release documents soon that explain the real situation.

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Open Source Java? Already done.

Posted Jun 24, 2005 18:33 UTC (Fri) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

Yes, indeed. Thank you for posting that.

Although I've not had the pleasure of chatting in person with Dalibor Topic and Mark Wielaard, as you have, they both did drop in on an OO.o 2.0 / Java thread on my local LUG mailing list, to reassure us that things have been improving rapidly with Classpath/gcj/gij/Kaffe/mauve.

My understanding is that (aside from the invaluable work of those coders and others) major credit is owed to Red Hat, Inc. for support of this initiative.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Open Source Java? Already done.

Posted Jun 25, 2005 6:39 UTC (Sat) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link]

Each time I try to run or build one of my programs on top of classpath, I've had failures. Latest I tried was I think Continuus. It doesn't pass the unit tests. So it's way much better than a couple of years ago, but it's still far from being usable for any application developers don't spend time making sure the free java has been fixed to run on them.