Mark J. Wielaard

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!