Mark J. Wielaard » General

Jelatine & chain-letters

Mark Wielaard — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:53:56 +0000

Now that I am actually paying attention to all the Micro Edition stuff I notice that there actually are a lot of them already (based on GNU Classpath). Today I stumbled upon Jelatine JVM:

Jelatine is a new Java Virtual Machine which targets the Java 2 Micro Edition Connected Limited Device Configuration (J2ME CLDC). The machine was designed to work on very small embedded systems and requires as little as 32 KiB of RAM for running non-trivial Java code (provided that the executable is stored in ROM). It also provides an (almost) CLDC compliant classpath which has been obtained by modifying and reusing parts of the GNU/Classpath project.

Completely unrelated. It seems the only correct way to stop this glorified-chain-letter stuff is to keep the fate and link to Smoochieboochies :)

Ruby + GNU Classpath = Ruva

Mark Wielaard — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 16:35:50 +0000

Funky stuff. Ruva: A simple stack-based virtual machine implementation written entirely in Ruby which uses GNU Classpath as core library implementation.

Party! I mean, serious collaboration at Fosdem

Mark Wielaard — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 12:22:41 +0000

As always GNU Classpath and Friends will come to Fosdem (Brussels, Belgium, 24/25 February) to discuss “the state of the world”. Obviously one big event going on in 2007 will be the OpenJDK project and figuring out how to work together. Normally we call this meeting “Escape the Java Trap”, but with Sun’s recent announcement it is clear the trap is being smashed at a very high speed now and our focus should be much more on the future of collaboration. So we decided to combine the original meeting with the traditional GNU/Linux distro DevJam meeting and the OpenJDK people. Bringing you three sessions on GNU Classpath, OpenJDK and Packaging. Hopefully we will still all fit in the same room :)

Tom Marble from Sun/OpenJDK posted some reasons you should be there. So come and join us!

GNU Classpath + PhoneME + SDLJava + cacao/jamvm/kaffe = MIDPath

Mark Wielaard — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:23:28 +0000

MIDPath provides a MIDP2 implementation on top of the SDL and SDLJava libraries. It targets free JVMs working with GNU Classpath: Cacao, Kaffe, JamVM. The code is based on phoneME, the free implementation of MIDP2 from Sun. MIDPath is released under the GPL.

Now you can play all those cool java phone games on your desktop using free sofware :)

GNU Classpath 0.93 "Dreamland"

Mark Wielaard — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 20:22:08 +0000

Last week GNU Classpath 0.93 “Dreamland” was finally released. As always this is the best release ever! The screenshots look really nice. And you should really go through the very extensive release notes which discuss everything. Highlights of new features in this release, pointers to supported applications and screenshots, the status and future of the 1.4 and 1.5 generics branches. An update on the Summer of Code student work. Plus some prelimenary ideas on cooperating with the Sun GPL OpenJDK Java project. And the GNU Classpath commitments to the Free Software community for the future of various projects around GNU Classpath, the users and GNU/Linux distros relying on our work.

Go team!

GNU Classpath, Sun, Java, GPL, Reflections & The Future

Mark Wielaard — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:52:18 +0000

Finally put down some of my thoughts on GNU Classpath, Sun, Java, GPL, Reflections & The Future for the GNU Classpath mailinglist. Even after two weeks I am still too overjoyed with the news to fully comprehend it or setup a proper roadmap (it is probably way too early for that anyway). But I believe the future is bright, very bright. The enthusiasm from the wider community has been really good. And there are new people flowing in. The work on the various projects around GNU Classpath has been energized and seems to have accelerated since the announcement of Sun’s GPL Java. So Jonathan Schwartz was right when he said that A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats. You will see the results much sooner than you might expect on a free desktop near you!

Mudfight

Mark Wielaard — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 12:37:59 +0000

I have been working for Red Hat for 5 months now helping the Frysk team and it has been a lot of fun. Red Hat is a great company but they do have one major flaw. After all this time they still haven’t managed to provide me with the gimmick that makes it all worth to work for them, the Red Fedora! But I believe I have finally found out why. Apparently one of Red Hat’s competitors convinced management that it makes engineers dance badly, or worse… I am not sure this movie will actually make lots of people buy more of Novell’s stuff. But it sure makes me look carefully before crossing a street. The question is whether I will ever like this American way of advertising. It is kind of funny, but also a little sick (and you don’t want to think about what their real marketing message is here…).

More mudslinging between Ubuntu and Suse. Pick your poison. Switch between one or the other because of abusing the GPL through shady patent deals or because of abusing the GPL through inclusion of proprietary programs and kernel modules. Spamming each others mailinglists. Great way to build a bigger community guys! Sigh.

Some downtime

Mark Wielaard — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 10:08:19 +0000

It is Thanksgiving in the USA which is where the primary GNU servers are. And since machines know the most inconvenient time to die, they apparently do during such holidays. See the status info on savannah (now up again), lists and fencepost still down atm. Sorry for the inconvenience.

update: “Everything is back online now – we had a hardware failure of the T1 router at the office.” –Ward

1 + 1 = 1.7

Mark Wielaard — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 09:57:10 +0000

First Andrew Hughes made Sun GPL javac compile and now Andrew Haley made it run with GNU Classpath and gcj/gij. Go Team!

Peter von der Ahé from Sun posted a update to upstream javac. It would be nice if the changes needed and made by Andrew and Andrew also found their way into some future update. Apparently Sun is working on updating the contributor agreement to mention that all contributions will (also) always be available as free software in the future which would be great (not that I think it would make much sense for Sun to keep a separate proprietary-only fork including outside contributions, but it is always a good thing to have such things explicitly put on paper).

Collaborate

Mark Wielaard — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 17:18:24 +0000

Thanks to the work of Sun’s Tom Marble and Kaffe’s Dalibor Topic all the Sun OpenJDK announcement videos are now available in Ogg/Theora format for your viewing pleasure. (See collaboration is starting already! But who wouldn’t want to work together with someone as nice as Dalibor.)

The videos are released under a Creative Commons License. And here is a 40 second clip that I think captures the spirit of the event (I hope that is fair use): Jonathan Schwartz on collaborating when he mentions our various communities by name. So, if you like that, go see the announcement video in full glory (1 hour) for the real thing. Another interesting part is when Rich Green explains the GPLv2 choice, introduces Richard Stallman, officially releases the code and confirms the usage of the GNU Classpath exception for the jse libraries (6 minutes, starting at 15:18 and ending at 21:38). The videos of Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen are also available separately.