Mark J. Wielaard

Paul wrote about “Fedora 10 around the corner!” and said something really nice:

Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank you, the reader, if I haven’t already. You’re part of our community too, and without you we would be diminished. Free software isn’t just about bits and bytes, it’s about people, about doing something real, something tangible, something lasting for your fellow human beings. And with your help, the Fedora Project has been able to lead in free software innovation for over five years and ten releases now. Each and every one of you — pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

Thanks Paul, very well said.

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.