28 Nov 2003

Posted on November 28, 2003, 14:21.

robilad is my hero for the day. When someone complained that the Mauve tests are probably wrong (or not useful) because they point out bugs in the proprietary core library implementation from Sun he described our feelings and hope about creating a truely free platform as follows:

That depends on the situation. If the behaviour is clearly a bug, like in the above case, I’d say report it to Sun, make sure Classpath does it better, and have a mauve test to expose the bug in the JDK. After all, the goal shouldn’t be to just have the classes, it should be to have the superior implementation. Having a test suite of our own helps in showing that everyone’s implementations are buggy, but at least you can fix the free ones and share the fixes ;)

[…]

In the long run, the JDK is as irrelevant as an industry standard as SCO Unix is now. Ten years ago, there were many (closed source) implementations of Unix-ish OSes. GNU/Linux is gradually replacing them.

I boldly predict that the same will happen with Java. True WORA for Java will arrive, but it will arrive through free software efforts like mauve & GNU Classpath [2] that will provide the next reference platform.

[2] And kaffe, gcj, sablevm, kissme, etc. of course ;)

Thanks Dalibor, I needed that!

«
»