OSCON Java Libre dinner
Being the sole GNU Classpath / gcj hacker in the Portland area during OSCON, I was invited to represent my peeps at a special dinner hosted by Sun last night. The Sun people included Simon Phipps, Laurie Tolson, Onno Kluyt, Mark Reinhold and Rich Sands. Also present were Geir M. (Apache Harmony/Intel), Ian Murdock (Free Standards Group), Allison Randal (Perl Foundation/parrot), Danese Cooper (Intel) and Tim O'Reilly.
They key messages from Sun were:
a) they are serious about making Java open source
b) it will almost certainly be liberated bit-by-bit
c) it's going to take a fair amount of time to get the whole thing out
d) they want to "do it right"
I don't think any of these statements are new to people who've been following the saga closely since the last JavaOne, but it was nice to hear them face-to-face, and they did seem to be sincere.
They're also looking for input from the Alternate Technologies community (their codeword for gcj, Harmony, etc). I think I did a reasonable job of representing the party line:
1. Open & unencumbered access to the TCK! Sun is working against their stated goal of driving compatibility by not doing this. The Free Software community values compatibility. This is why we created Mauve.
2. When you "Open Source" java, do it fully and use a GPL and Apache License compatible license.
Ian's position was that Sun should do whatever is required for their Java to be distributed as part of the standard Red Hat offerings. This would open the door to including Java in the LSB. I was clear that I couldn't speak for Red Hat, but as a member of the Free Software and Fedora communities I think that we would love to have a complete, fully FOSS & JPackage compatible alternative available for Fedora packaging. It's safe to assume that this is one key prerequisite to getting technology into Fedora derivatives.
There was plenty of other great discussion about embedded java, Debian/Ubuntu -vs- Fedora, the JCP, and the LSB.
Thanks to Simon, Laurie, Rich & Co. for the invite and for listening. I'm looking forward to some action!
Meanwhile, as of two days ago Fedora devel includes gcjwebplugin for running java applets in your browser. Check it out!
