Mark J. Wielaard

Dang ol’Internet says: yay for Free Java

It is a bit old (in internet time) article from Don Marti “Dang
ol’Internet says: yay for Free Java”. But I really like
his description of how Sun with their latest move GPLing their
Enterprise, Standard and Micro Edition versions of Java
solidly joins the free software movement. How the existing
GPLed projects around GNU Classpath are already adapting and
creating innovative works based on it. And how this GPL
move clears the patent mine-field so nicely in a way
that makes patent trolls worried. And that can only be a
good thing :) Thanks Sun!

Finally put down some of my thoughts on GNU Classpath, Sun, Java, GPL, Reflections & The Future for the GNU Classpath mailinglist. Even after two weeks I am still too overjoyed with the news to fully comprehend it or setup a proper roadmap (it is probably way too early for that anyway). But I believe the future is bright, very bright. The enthusiasm from the wider community has been really good. And there are new people flowing in. The work on the various projects around GNU Classpath has been energized and seems to have accelerated since the announcement of Sun’s GPL Java. So Jonathan Schwartz was right when he said that A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats. You will see the results much sooner than you might expect on a free desktop near you!

I have been working for Red Hat for 5 months now helping the Frysk team and it has been a lot of fun. Red Hat is a great company but they do have one major flaw. After all this time they still haven’t managed to provide me with the gimmick that makes it all worth to work for them, the Red Fedora! But I believe I have finally found out why. Apparently one of Red Hat’s competitors convinced management that it makes engineers dance badly, or worse… I am not sure this movie will actually make lots of people buy more of Novell’s stuff. But it sure makes me look carefully before crossing a street. The question is whether I will ever like this American way of advertising. It is kind of funny, but also a little sick (and you don’t want to think about what their real marketing message is here…).

More mudslinging between Ubuntu and Suse. Pick your poison. Switch between one or the other because of abusing the GPL through shady patent deals or because of abusing the GPL through inclusion of proprietary programs and kernel modules. Spamming each others mailinglists. Great way to build a bigger community guys! Sigh.

It is Thanksgiving in the USA which is where the primary GNU servers are. And since machines know the most inconvenient time to die, they apparently do during such holidays. See the status info on savannah (now up again), lists and fencepost still down atm. Sorry for the inconvenience.

update: “Everything is back online now – we had a hardware failure of the T1 router at the office.” –Ward

Strong words on solidarity

Bruce Perens posted an open letter to
Novell’s CEO Ron Hovsepian that contains some strong
words on how we should all show solidarity in the face of
patent threats against our community.

The covenant of the GPL is that in the face of a software
patent aggressor we must all hang together, lest we each
hang separately. Novell accepted that covenant when you
chose to include the Linux kernel, the GNU C library, and
hundreds of additional works created at no charge to Novell
by individuals in the Free Software community and licensed
under the GPL.

It is abundantly clear that Novell and Microsoft took the
time to engineer a circuitous legal path of issuing
covenants to each other’s customers, rather than licenses to
each other, in order to circumvent Novell’s earlier
agreement with the community of GPL software developers.

[…]

This is unacceptable. If Novell is to benefit from the Free
Software community, Novell should be working to make it safe
for everyone to write and use software.

There are serious questions regarding how Novell intends to
go on with its business. Developers are jumping ship. The
very software that you sell is owned by parties who are now
hostile to your company. The C library, essential to run
every program on your system, is the property of the Free
Software Foundation, which will surely relicense that
library to LGPL 3. The leading developer of that library is
a Red Hat employee. It’s already been announced that GPL and
LGPL 3 will contain terms that make it untenable to use
while your patent agreement with Microsoft stands.

The Samba software and hundreds of other programs will
probably go a similar path. The Novell-Microsoft agreement
has even had the power to make the Linux kernel developers
and the large companies that support them take a fresh look
at GPL 3. In the face of these changes, Novell will probably
be stuck with old versions of the software, under old
licenses, with Novell sustaining the entire cost and burden
of maintaining that software. Novell will have to maintain
its customers on old versions while the community takes GPL
3 versions of the same software into the future.

In short, now that Novell has chosen not to hang together
with the Free Software community, we’ve chosen not to do so
with you.

There is really only one path out of this corner for Novell.
Go on with your technical collaboration, and keep the money.
But Novell must now direct Microsoft to refrain from
granting covenants to Novell’s users unless they will apply
to everyone equally. Hang together with the Free Software
community by changing your software patent stance from one
of monopoly rights for Novell to one of support for
legislation that will make it safe for all of us to create,
distribute, and use software.

Add
Your Signature

First Andrew Hughes made Sun GPL javac compile and now Andrew Haley made it run with GNU Classpath and gcj/gij. Go Team!

Peter von der Ahé from Sun posted a update to upstream javac. It would be nice if the changes needed and made by Andrew and Andrew also found their way into some future update. Apparently Sun is working on updating the contributor agreement to mention that all contributions will (also) always be available as free software in the future which would be great (not that I think it would make much sense for Sun to keep a separate proprietary-only fork including outside contributions, but it is always a good thing to have such things explicitly put on paper).

Thanks to the work of Sun’s Tom Marble and Kaffe’s Dalibor Topic all the Sun OpenJDK announcement videos are now available in Ogg/Theora format for your viewing pleasure. (See collaboration is starting already! But who wouldn’t want to work together with someone as nice as Dalibor.)

The videos are released under a Creative Commons License. And here is a 40 second clip that I think captures the spirit of the event (I hope that is fair use): Jonathan Schwartz on collaborating when he mentions our various communities by name. So, if you like that, go see the announcement video in full glory (1 hour) for the real thing. Another interesting part is when Rich Green explains the GPLv2 choice, introduces Richard Stallman, officially releases the code and confirms the usage of the GNU Classpath exception for the jse libraries (6 minutes, starting at 15:18 and ending at 21:38). The videos of Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen are also available separately.

FOSDEM 2007 (24-25th February 2007 in Brussels, Belgium) has been confirmed. We will have a room for 100 people and Sun.be has asked for an OpenJDK booth that the FOSDEM organization will place not too far away from that room. Mark your calendars. Details to follow.

Libre Java!

For your reading pleasure:

• As Stallman looks on, Sun frees Java under the GPL
• Q&A with Tim Bray
• Mark Reinhold’s Blog

And guess what they mean with “following established free
software community practices for licensing virtual machines
and their associated libraries”. Yes! They will use the GPL
and the GPL+exception! As used by GNU Classpath, gcj, kaffe,
cacao, jamvm, jnode, etc. How great and amazing is that?

Congratulations everybody!

Sometimes you see something amazing and find out what a long lost friend is doing now. Go Graydon!

More info on Mozilla, Adobe and the GPL/MPL/LGPL Tamarin virtual machine can be found in their press release.