Mark J. Wielaard

That was one fun week! It was so great to meet Dalibor Topic, Casey Marshall, David Daney, Tom Tromey and Tom Fitzsimmons who feel like old friends even though we really only meet and work together virtually.

OpenJDK is now in full swing and Sun put up a great show at JavaOne. We were all a little embarrassed by the fact that the people not “trapped” at JavaOne seemed to have the most fun with the code (and of course Tom Fitzsimmons, who was at JavaOne with us but just seems unstoppable). Great work people! Tom Marble made sure that John Cage did a little shout out to all those hacking and having fun during the keynote introductions. And please go a little easy on the Sun OpenJDK engineers. They got the message loud and clear – you are really enthusiastic and want more tests to make sure that what you contribute is of impeccable quality – they are scrambling to give you all the tools and scale to match your enthusiasm.

There is a news article about one of the libre java sessions we had (with a somewhat dramatic title, which always seems to happen when you allow journalists to attend sessions that are really meant to be for hackers just talking together, but capturing some of the real discussions going on). There were multiple sessions like that and a lot of insights into what makes an community. In the end it all resolves around trust and having the feeling that you can work together without loosing your own identity.

And Sun went out of their way to be open and transparent, while listening to all the voices of the different communities. They had made sure there was plenty of outside input. Personal highlights were some of discussions between and with people like Peter Brown (FSF), Cliff Schmidt (ASF) and Eben Moglen (FSLC) on communities, working together, learning from the past and doing better in the future. Because the libre java community deserves a great united community where everybody has the freedom to be a little different.

There are too many Sun people to thank for last week, but Bruno Souza, Tom Marble, Rich Sands, Onno Kluyt, Mark Reinhold, David Herron and Simon Phipps deserve special thanks for taking a lot of time out of their very busy schedule during JavaOne to make us feel at home, introduce us to numerous interesting people, getting us into parties and offering more free beer than any of us could drink. With people like these as guardian angles libre Java, and the openjdk project in particular, has a very bright future.

On top of all that I had a really good time together with Petri touring the state of the Beach Boys, Zorro and Schwarzenegger, visiting the most amazing national park (Yosemite), meeting up with my pals Vincent and Erwin (who took us to a fascinating concert by Junior Brown) and finally meeting one of my Red Hat colleagues and uberhacker Roland McGrath to discuss all things Frysk. Completely exhausted, but very happy.