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:
It is fun to see how far we have come over the years.
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!)
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!
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IcedTea 7 has been replaced by IcedTea 6 (and the package is now called openjdk).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!