It's been great fun to catch up with the other free runtime developers. Gcj and GNU Classpath are making massive progress, as the demos showed, in particular Graydon's Swing demos, Tromey's blazing fast eclipse and Fitzsim's videostreaming Fluendo applet via gcj.

It's been very nice to finally meet some of the people I only knew from online discussions in person. Bruno Souza shared his passion and energy about the brazilian free Java projects under the Javali umbrella, and Geir Magnusson Jr. explained how the things worked out on Apache's side, with an in-depth look at how the Geronimos and the Apache Software Foundation dealt with TCK access and the strings attached to it (NDAs). Danese Cooper explained how the OSI works and how corporations tick, while Onno Kluyt, Sun's JCP guy, explained a bit how things (ought to) work from Sun's perspective.

I was in particular glad for the opportunity to speak to Onno in person about the things that I don't like in SCSL, JRL, JSPA and all those weird legal agreements surrounding Java(TM) technology. It's been an interesting day-and-a-half of discussion about how to deal with compatiblity and free software licensing and whether or how to work around or with Sun. I am interested in having Sun pull along with free runtimes, so I was glad that someone from Sun was officially invited.

Among things we ended up discussing was what would happen if I applied as a qualified individual for a 1.5 TCK license for the whole GNU Classpath/GNU JAXP/GNU Crypto/Jessie/GNU inetlib/Tritonus/... conglomerate I've been slowly merging into Kaffe. Since officially the 1.5 TCK should now be available for independant implementations, I may try to see how willing Sun is to consider dozens of compatible, independant, free software (as in GPL, for example), J2SE 5 implementations as something positive and worth supporting with a J2SE TCK scholarship.

Other ideas were floated around too, like establishing a Kaffe presence on java.net, Sun's community site, or applying for an ObjectWeb membership, who have managed to strike a scholarhip deal for a J2EE TCK.

I've talked to many gcj developers about bringing Kaffe and gcj a bit closer together by merging in more of gcj's code into Kaffe. I was very happy to meet Rob Gonzales, Kaffe's verifier guy, and we had some good time discussing a verifier merge from gcj into Kaffe with Tom Tromey. Other ideas I discussed were merging in libffi, and gcjx, and of course the upcoming gcj binary compatibility ABI.

Fernando Nasser and Paul Nasrat presented on JPackage, which has come a very long way. JPackage includes working support to build things from source, as RPMs, has found a way to deal with the Maven issues, has started to support gcj-ed packages, and seems like a pretty good way to deal with packaging Java applications and libraries. Very impressive.

Watching the Mauve, GNU Classpath, gcj and JPackage presentations was a bit like watching a long piece in tetris slowly slide into place to complete four rows at once. There was a considerable amount of jaw-dropping on the first day. Miguel's Mono presentation afterwards lacked a bit of the usual esprit that goes with it.

Finally, I was able to meet Michael Hind, and see his presentation on JikesRVM, a pure Java, yet blazing fast free runtime. It's been a pleasure to chat with Michael, Steve from Intel, and other runtime developers that don't frequent the usual IRC channels.

And last but not least, Ean Schuessler was around, and we really missed Arnaud for a Kaffe Debian packaging session. Instead, Ean showed me his impressive work on OfBiz, and explained me how things are moving forward in Brazil, along with Bruno.

I probably forgot to mention a thing or two from the tightly packed summit. I'm sure others will blog about it, though :)