Older blog entries for mjw (starting at number 82)

It is a bit old (in internet time) article from Don Marti "Dang ol'Internet says: yay for Free Java". But I really like his description of how Sun with their latest move GPLing their Enterprise, Standard and Micro Edition versions of Java solidly joins the free software movement. How the existing GPLed projects around GNU Classpath are already adapting and creating innovative works based on it. And how this GPL move clears the patent mine-field so nicely in a way that makes patent trolls worried. And that can only be a good thing :) Thanks Sun!

Bruce Perens posted an open letter to Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian that contains some strong words on how we should all show solidarity in the face of patent threats against our community.

The covenant of the GPL is that in the face of a software patent aggressor we must all hang together, lest we each hang separately. Novell accepted that covenant when you chose to include the Linux kernel, the GNU C library, and hundreds of additional works created at no charge to Novell by individuals in the Free Software community and licensed under the GPL.

It is abundantly clear that Novell and Microsoft took the time to engineer a circuitous legal path of issuing covenants to each other's customers, rather than licenses to each other, in order to circumvent Novell's earlier agreement with the community of GPL software developers.

[...]

This is unacceptable. If Novell is to benefit from the Free Software community, Novell should be working to make it safe for everyone to write and use software.

There are serious questions regarding how Novell intends to go on with its business. Developers are jumping ship. The very software that you sell is owned by parties who are now hostile to your company. The C library, essential to run every program on your system, is the property of the Free Software Foundation, which will surely relicense that library to LGPL 3. The leading developer of that library is a Red Hat employee. It's already been announced that GPL and LGPL 3 will contain terms that make it untenable to use while your patent agreement with Microsoft stands.

The Samba software and hundreds of other programs will probably go a similar path. The Novell-Microsoft agreement has even had the power to make the Linux kernel developers and the large companies that support them take a fresh look at GPL 3. In the face of these changes, Novell will probably be stuck with old versions of the software, under old licenses, with Novell sustaining the entire cost and burden of maintaining that software. Novell will have to maintain its customers on old versions while the community takes GPL 3 versions of the same software into the future.

In short, now that Novell has chosen not to hang together with the Free Software community, we've chosen not to do so with you.

There is really only one path out of this corner for Novell. Go on with your technical collaboration, and keep the money. But Novell must now direct Microsoft to refrain from granting covenants to Novell's users unless they will apply to everyone equally. Hang together with the Free Software community by changing your software patent stance from one of monopoly rights for Novell to one of support for legislation that will make it safe for all of us to create, distribute, and use software.

Add Your Signature

For your reading pleasure:

• As Stallman looks on, Sun frees Java under the GPL
• Q&A with Tim Bray
• Mark Reinhold's Blog

And guess what they mean with "following established free software community practices for licensing virtual machines and their associated libraries". Yes! They will use the GPL and the GPL+exception! As used by GNU Classpath, gcj, kaffe, cacao, jamvm, jnode, etc. How great and amazing is that?

Congratulations everybody!

It is a sad thing to see Advogato go. I didn't post much here anymore but I was a passionate follower of some of the people posting. It has the true original Free Software hacker spirit. Advogato you will be missed!

P.S. I moved my primary blog to http://gnu.wildebeest.org/diary/

linuxtag is great. there were about 60 people at my talk and there is real interest in gnu classpath. Several people having written free software in the java programming language have told be they get frequent request by their users to make sure their software works with gnu classpath and friends :)

during my vacation my dsl connection got "upgraded". which of course means everything broke :{ So no email access... my apologies if you are waiting for some reply to some email. i'll try to catch up as quickly as possible when I get back home next week.

zdnet uk has a nice interview with Peter Brown the executive director of the Free Software Foundation. It is good to see some more FSF people get some exposure in the press lately. It is facinating how different in personality people like Richard, Eben and Peter are. And how they have a completely different style when interacting with people. But they share the passion for providing (software) freedom to users.

Thomas Fitzsimmons has a nice proposal to add GCJ support to JPackage spec files. That sounds really nice. Good packaging and version support seems to be the next barrier. We know we have pretty good free software implementations of the core libraries, compilers and tools. Now we need to build better integration of all the packages we support for the various GNU/Linux distributions. And if we can reuse the work of the JPackage group that would be great.

jrvm, jdwp and free swing/awt support

Ian Rogers has been very active. He got the GNU Classpath Free Swing and AWT working with jrvm. And he has been playing with the GNU Classpath JDWP implementation. At the end of the thread Keith explains what works and what needs work (at least for gij). Cool stuff.

I will give a talk at LinuxTag (Wiesbaden, Germany, 3-6 May) this year about GNU Classpath. The talk will be a bit more high-level then what we did during Fosdem. I will mainly talk about the things people can do right now with what is included with their current GNU/Linux distributions. Since I will be there from Thursday till Saturday it would be fun to meet some people there. We can have a little hack-session, or just get together for some drinks and talk. Please let me know if you will be there. My talk is on Thursday May 4th at 16:00: GNU Classpath - The Free and Innovative alternative to the java programming language.

Congratulations to the Mozilla team. The long relicensing process is finally complete. All the code in the Mozilla source code repository which makes up Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey and Camino is now available under your choice of the MPL, LGPL or GPL! And another barrier falls. I cannot wait till GPLv3 is released and we will see even more possibilities for cooperation in the Free Software world.

At our GNU Classpath and Friends meeting during Fosdem a lot of cool demos were given that showed what is possible with GNU Classpath now. So we decided to push out a new release so everybody can play with all the new stuff (0.90 works out of the box with jamvm 1.4.2 or cacao 0.95). Some highlights:

JTables can be rearranged and resized. Free Swing text components support highlighting and clipboard. Much improved styled text. Fast event dispatching and lower memory consumption. Better support for mixing lightweight and heavyweight components in AWT containers. GNU Crypto and Jessie cryptographic algorithms have been added providing ssl3/tls1 and https support. Unicode 4.0.0 support. GIOP and RMI stub and tie source code tools. XML validaton support for RELAX NG and W3C XML schemas. New file backend for util.prefs. Updated gnu.regexp from POSIX to util.regex syntax.

But the most exciting thing must be that MegaMek started working. That will surely boost the productivity of our GNU Classpath hackers :)