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Tricky wording

Tricky wording

Posted Nov 10, 2005 19:46 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: Debian and Nexenta collide by mjw
Parent article: Debian and Nexenta collide

> not wasting our time

Just to make myself clear, I think neither that GCJ/classpath is a waste of time, nor do I think you guys are wasting time. I think that Sun are being irresponsible by letting you guys spend preciuos time on this work, while they could have (and should have) released their JDK under the GPL long, long time ago. If they did that, Java would probably be at version 5.0 (no, _real_ version 5.0). And, every Linux distro would be able to ship a _fully_ _functional_ JDK, with absolutely no strings attached. How much more FOSS software would have been written in Java if that were the case? Truckloads. Simply because distributors would be able to _rely_ on the fact that it is always there.

Believe me, I admire what has been done with GCJ and classpath. But I hate to see a wasted effort in the FOSS world when there is no good reason for it. And, all because of the company that supposedly "invented" open source, but cannot understand the basic concepts around it.


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Tricky wording

Posted Nov 18, 2005 3:53 UTC (Fri) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link]

Sure, there could be a lot of great things Sun could have done in the past 10 years to advance the state of the art in that area. They've made it clear that they won't open up their implemetation, come what may, though, for whatever reasons they have. It's their code, so it's their problem. ;)

So the solution for the rest of us is to write a better implementation that removes the need to deal with the bizarre problems of the proprietary one. Worked for gcc, Linux, and a bunch of other things. It will work again, it just takes a bit of time to get done, like any good thing.

cheers,
dalibor topic

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