Stallman consistency

Stallman consistency

Posted Nov 14, 2006 22:32 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Stallman consistency by iabervon
Parent article: Sun releases Java under GPLv2

There's the futher confusion that we didn't ask for a free UNIX; he just wrote one.

Maybe we didn't ask -- as long as proprietary software was just starting to be, and universities could get liberal terms from AT&T, the necessity for a free Unix was not so concerning. The moment people started to care BSD spread like wildfire.

I think he also cares about specifications; [...] That's one reason to want to TCKs: so that we can tell that Gnava behaves as JBoss and Eclipse expect [...]

Maybe, and your argumentation seems quite sensible to me, but I haven't seen Stallman ask for freely distributable specifications. Maybe he hasn't thought this aspect through. Somehow I doubt it: the TCKs are mostly important for certification, because actual compliance can be measured in different ways such as following the spec or even reverse engineering. If Red Hat or another deep-pocketed organization wants to certify their own customized version of the JVM they can pay for it. For most of us, complying with the freely available spec (and behaving like Sun's implementation) might be enough, if we are to judge by other free software programs.

I don't see today's release as being fundamentally any more significant than if Classpath were to have completed their implementation and someone with the TCKs reported that it passed.

Make it "if Classpath passed current TCKs and we had an assurance that it would pass any future TCKs as soon as possible", which would be no small feat in itself.

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