Oliver Jones wrote:
The proof is in the pudding... Sun dances with this all the time, personally, I think its just a marketing ploy.
RedHat's development efforts with gcj and GNU classpaths is making very good progress. Now that JBoss is apart of RH, one can only see the open JVM will improve greatly.
Did JBoss get bought or are you just saying JBoss is bundled by RH?
Did you miss this: http://www.redhat.com/promo/jboss/ http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2006/jboss.html
The fact that I do not need to run a closed JVM to run OOo, eclipse, azureus etc on FC5 is very cool. The fact that I can build limewire, for example, with out Sun's JDK is even better!
Yes GCJ is getting very good. But it has a shitty JVM last time I checked. So unless you comple to x86 binary your code runs like crap. There is lots of Java bytecode out there and not all of it is open source or can be compiled with GCJ.
A great deal of effort is still being made, I know with in the Fedora commuinty atleast, to make applications build and run with GCJ. The number of java applications that work with GCJ grows all the time.
There is on going work on the mozplugin to make it work better with this enviroment and should be released in FC6 is really good.
So why worry about Sun's JVM?
Because it is better than GCJ and if it comes with a suitably unrestricted license (they say OSI certified) it will mean we get to the Java "finish line" faster on Linux. This won't kill GCJ either, it will only make GCJ better I think.
For a long time Windows was a better desktop... didn't stop people using a different OS ;) Some interesting points have been made on the fedora-devel list.... From the DLJ FAQ: - Distribute the entire JDK - no subsetting. Note - the README file has the specifics of what you must distribute, and what can be omitted. So its all or nothing, no splitting it into subpackages. - Present for acceptance any end user licenses that are part of the JDK, if such licenses are included in the generic install bundle provided to you for repackaging. Click-through license required - not acceptable, especially during install (how would an automated kickstart even do this?). *note - rpm is designed to be non-interactive, so this is probably not an issue with apt, which allows (by design) interaction. - Indemnify Sun against claims arising from your OS or your violation of the DLJ (or any applicable law) Note that you are not responsible for changes made to your OS distribution by downstream users or distributors when such changes are out of your control. I don't think any distro will indemnify anyone. And this is the best comment so far: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=jdk_on_gnu_linux_something#co... Quotation from the comment: "No, it's OK to distribute along with GCJ, GNU/Classpath and so on - that was one of the explicit intents of the new license as that was previously the chief obstacle to distribution with GNU/Linux." So, you either ship Sun's java or you don't. So, IMHO, Sun's attempt to "open" java is more a wolf in sheeps clothing than some gift that the OSS communities should be grateful for. Michael