Advogato blog for mjw

The GPL is like a green envelope

Sat, 10 May 2008 08:05:00 GMT

German court tells Skype to obey the GPL:

“If a publisher wants to publish a book of an author that wants his book only to be published in a green envelope, then that might seem odd to you, but still you will have to do it as long as you want to publish the book and have no other agreement in place.”

Fedora IcedTea/OpenJDK in EPEL for RHEL and CentOS

Mon, 5 May 2008 20:07:04 GMT

An EPEL update brought a nice surprise. The Fedora 9 IcedTea/OpenJDK packages rebuild for RHEL and CentOS on i386, ppc and x86_64. So if you are running RHEL or CentOS on your servers you can now:

$ rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
$ yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-{devel,plugin,demo,javadoc,src}

Drop, shake and soak AWT/Swing with JamVM/GNU Classpath

Sat, 3 May 2008 12:05:18 GMT

Rugged PDA available with JamVM and GNU Classpath

The Nomad maintains compliance with the MIL-STD-810F standard for drops, vibration, and temperature extremes, says SDG, and is IP67 rated for imperviousness to water and dust. It can withstand 30 minutes exposure under a meter of water, says SDG, as well as survive temperatures ranging from -22 to 144 degrees F. […] Developers can create both AWT and Swing applications using the JamVM virtual machine and the GNU Classpath Libraries […] the Nomad sells for $1,650 to $2,300.

A bit pricey, but so cool! :)

Down LWN libre-java memory lane

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:18:30 GMT

LWN published their index of all guest articles.
Since I was asked a couple of times to write about our libre-java efforts there are a couple of mine included:

GCJ - past, present, and future (April 6, 2005)
The GNU Classpath distro DevJam - Europe (September 28, 2005)
A look at GCJ 4.1 (February 8, 2006)
Toward a free Java (May 24, 2006)
Piecing together free java (November 20, 2007)

It is fun to see how far we have come over the years.

GPL Shopping

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:12:47 GMT

I moved houses, but not my whole network setup, so I needed a little router to connect all the machines I already moved. Walking into the store the first router box that I saw had a big GPL-Inside sticker on it! How have times changed. Apparently having the three letters G-P-L on your (hardware) box is now an extra incentive for your customers to buy your stuff. Very nice. And routers these days are really full general purpose (MIPS based) computers. For this one (and others) there is a whole community creating alternative software installations. OpenWRT even includes JamVM and GNU Classpath (now how is that for an incentive to work on JamVM Robert!)

What planet are you from?

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:11:01 GMT

Merging communities, so hard, and so much fun. We exchanged an “ambassador” and Mark Reinhold started an interplanetary exchange of species. Lets import some fresh blood on this little Planet Classpath of ours. Hi David, Hi Mark, Hi Joe, Hi Kelly, Hi Rich!

Fedora 9 Preview

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:06:17 GMT

Been playing with the Fedora 9 Preview release on my laptop this weekend. It feels pretty snappy and the integration of the various new components is pretty smooth. I didn’t find any personal show stoppers. So I will definitely upgrade my main machine as soon as the final release is out (currently scheduled for May 13th). And the Fedora 9 feature list is impressive. Except for the GCC 4.3 integration (and the 4.3 gcj/classpath parts were mostly backported to gcc 4.2 in Fedora 8 already), there isn’t anything official in the release notes about the fancy new java integration features as far as I can see. That is a shame because there is a lot of improvements in this area.

IcedTea 7 has been replaced by IcedTea 6 (and the package is now called openjdk). Including the appletviewer plugin (based on gcjwebplugin) and javaws (based on netx, but not installed by default yet). Eclipse 3.3.2 is included and seems to fly. It is pretty solid and imports and builds GNU Classpath from cvs out of the box (always a big plus with me). There are new official Java Packaging Guidelines. New guidelines describing how to deal with GCJ AOT compilation in Java packages. New guidelines describing how to package Eclipse plugins. And I was also happy to see things like JNA, Batik and FOP packaged now. Looks like java will slowly be better integrated with GNU/Linux distros!

Frysk example utilities

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:20:00 GMT

Phil recently wrote up some examples of utilities created on top of the Frysk framework that you might find handy (part1, part2, part3). We now also have the frysk manual pages for the non-gui parts online.

Get ready for Fosdem - Free Java Meeting

Fri, 8 Feb 2008 21:05:13 GMT

It is that time of year again! All libre java projects and hackers come together to celebrate, plan, hack and discuss.

There is a Free Java devroom and a list of people and activities. See you there!

IcedTea, gcjwebplugin and Cortado (ogg/theora streaming)

Mon, 4 Feb 2008 20:05:34 GMT

With IcedTea installed, which includes gcjwebplugin, I was browsing a little and suddenly hit a streaming ogg/theora video that used the Cortado applet. And it just worked! Including sound support! So install the latest IcedTea and Try It Out!.

A full GPLed streaming video and audio stack. How wonderful!