This post by Kirill Grouchnikov from Pushing Pixels made me sad:

Trust is hard to build and easy to destroy

Are we really doing that badly? Ever since the full GPL release by Sun of the reference implementation of Java as OpenJDK and the positive wave that IcedTea brought to unite the existing libre java communities pushing Java into the core of the various GNU/Linux distros, I feel like the sky is the limit. We as a community now have the full freedom to cooperate with each other in whatever way we like. But for some the feeling is still not there. Are we afraid to really define “Java the next generation”? It seems the code and the spirit is there. But there is a leadership trust issue. How do we fix that?

There is always a lot going on in the low levels of the GNU Toolchain (gcc, binutils, gdb, etc) but since it is so low level and sometimes a bit specialised it is hard to keep up. Luckily Nick Clifton started a blog writing a monthly GNU Toolchain Update. This month saw lots of GCC updates (a new register allocator, a new set of loop transformation optimizations, a new picoChip port and more). Really recommended for those who want to keep informed about the latest GNU Toolchain improvements.

We bought an Acer Aspire One A150 Ab, which comes with Linpus, a stripped down Fedora GNU/Linux distro. It also came with a nice printed GPL in the box explaining what it meant and various offers for the source code. The stripped down Fedora is somewhat limited, so we might upgrade it to a full Fedora install. What was cool to see was that it came with IcedTea and gcjwebplugin configured out of the box.

Free Java for your netbook!

Benjamin Mako Hill, who is now on the board of the FSF, has a really great site Revealing Errors that has as goal to reveal errors that reveal the technology around us to learn how technology affects our lives. Wish I had seen this site earlier. As he explains it is a great way to reach users and show how technologies affect our lives, and why Free Software is so important:

Errors are under-appreciated and under-utilised in their ability to reveal technology around us. By painting a picture of how certain technologies facilitate certain mistakes, one can better show how technology mediates. By revealing errors, scholars and activists can reveal previously invisible technologies and their effects more generally. Errors can reveal technology—and its power and can do so in ways that users of technologies confront daily and understand intimately.

He gave a really nice introduction to the whole concept in his Revealing Errors OSCON Keynote (ogg/theora).

Finally upgraded my main workstation from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. If you are lazy like me then you might want to do it through Fedora PreUpgrade:

$ yum install preupgrade
$ preupgrade

Very nice and completely painless!

It also offers an easy way to go from Fedora 9 to Rawhide (the development branch).

From the “Freedom Fry” press release:

The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing “Happy Birthday to GNU,” a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry.

“Yum, chocolately good! The tastiest operating system in the world… and it’s all free!”

And don’t forget to start preparing for Software Freedom Day on September 20 and the GNU anniversary on September 27.

So what is the first thing you try out on your little bare arm board when you get IcedTea, Cacao and gcjwebplugin working? You try to play slime volleyball of course!

Read all about it on Xerxes Rånby’s blog.

Just saw A Lazy Developer Approach: Building a JVM with Third Party Software by Nicolas Geoffray, Gael Thomas, Charles Clement and Bertil Folliot. They show something I always found super cool about the community around GNU Classpath and the free software community in general. Working together on parts of free software to enable everybody to stand on top of the shoulders of giants.

The development of a complete Java Virtual Machine (JVM) implementation is a tedious process which involves knowledge in different areas: garbage collection, just in time compilation, interpretation, file parsing, data structures, etc. The result is that developing its own virtual machine requires a considerable amount of man/year. In this paper we show that one can implement a JVM with third party software and with performance comparable to industrial and top open-source JVMs. Our proof-of-concept implementation uses existing versions of a garbage collector, a just in time compiler, and the base library, and is robust enough to execute complex Java applications such as the OSGi Felix implementation and the Tomcat servlet container.

They have some nice things to say about GNU Classpath and our VM Interface

Industrial JVMs often have their own implementation of garbage collection, compilation, interpretation and class libraries. Open-source JVMs tend to all use the GNU Classpath base library implementation [6] (some JVMs are currently being ported to the newly open-sourced Sun implementation), and the Boehm garbage collector [22]. GNU Classpath and Boehm GC are popular among JVM implementations because they are virtual machine agnostic, hence they do not depend on a particular JVM implementation.

[...]

We started the project with GNU Classpath version 0.93. LadyVM now uses the latest version, 0.97.2. Since GNU Classpath has had many releases before 0.93, the API changes between 0.93 and 0.97.2 were minimal.

GNU Classpath moved to java version 1.5, including generics, with release 0.95. Since the JVM specification did not change between version 1.4 and 1.5, the move to GNU Classpath 0.95 did not require any changes in LadyVM. The only modification we made was due to the ldc opcode, which loads classes since JVM 1.5.

So next time you want java somewhere, just pick up the free software pieces already there and click them together for your environment :)

Things that make you smile:

From: Matthias Klose
To: debian-68k@lists.debian.org
Subject: building openjdk-6 for m68k

the openjdk-6 6b11-4 should build on m68k. It may take a few weeks, but I currently don’t see any issue with it. If you do so, please keep the build tree, so that the testsuite can be run, after the build finishes (taking some more weeks to finish).

It is a pure IcedTea Zero interpreter for Hotspot build (unfortunately the cacao m68k jit is currently “broken” :{ ), which explains the long, long, long build time. But if you have some spare m68k machine around and a couple of spare weeks, please do give it a try.

You would hope that Sun would get it by now, but apparently not :{

From the new JavaFX license:

“Licensee is not authorized to modify, make derivative works of, disclose, distribute, reverse engineer or disassemble the Technology, decompile binary portions of the Technology, or otherwise attempt to derive source code from such portions, or transfer the Technology to any third party or use it in development activities.”

“Licensee shall have no right to use the Technology for commercial uses or in a production environment.”

“Java Technology Restrictions. You may not create, modify, or change the behavior of, or authorize your licensees to create, modify, or change the behavior of, classes, interfaces, or subpackages that are in any way identified as “java”, “javax”, “javafx”, “sun” or similar convention as specified by Sun in any naming convention designation.”

Sigh.

Update It gets better:

“It is understood and agreed that, notwithstanding any other provision of this Agreement, Licensee’s breach of Sections 2.0 (Limited Licenses), 3.0 (Restrictions), 6.0 (Term and Termination), and/or 7.0 (Confidential Information) of this Agreement will cause Sun irreparable damage for which recovery of money damages would be inadequate…”

It is as if someone from Sun Legal was reading the Ubersoft episodes Grand Design and Ultimate Goal while drafting this license.

Andrew Haley and Thomas Fitzsimmons wrote a really nice article for Red Hat Magazine called Open source project: OpenJDK detailing our libre java journey from the perspective of Fedora and Red Hat. From Sun’s first announcement, GNU Classpath & GCJ, bootstrapping IcedTea, gcjwebplugin, webstart, PPC and the zero port, OpenJDK6, to being (almost) Java SE Compatible. Go read it!

When you upgrade to Fedora 9, make sure you get the zero-day update of icedtea/openjdk that Lillian made. It includes some sound fixes, Gervill midi support, the hat tool and fixes for javaws/netx. Then try out Jake2 (GPLed Quake engine in Java using Jogl and Joal). Just click that Jake2 webstart link, it will just work out of the box. Awesome!

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.”

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}

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! :)

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.

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!

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 online.

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!

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!

Join the FSF as an Associate Member! Click that link! I need only 1 more referral to receive great gifts!

update: And as Thomas pointed out in the comments, don’t forget about the FSF sister organizations, they need your support too!

• There is a nice interview with Thomas Fitzsimmons about Fedora and IcedTea.
• LWN published my article about Piecing together free java.