Mark J. Wielaard

Interesting. The FSF Europe has started a “We speak about Free Software” campaign at http://fsfeurope.org/documents/whyfs.html. There are already some companies that participate. Nice.

They do say a couple of times that the Open Source initiative failed but they do not explain very good why it failed. They should explicitly mention that The Open Source trademark does (no longer) exist and that the OSI seems to only look at the letter of the Open Source Definition which means that some Open Source licenses are actually not really Free Software licenses (such as the ASPL or the original Artistic license).

Found out that the Classpath Extensions project has a project page. They incorporated the javax.servlet package that Paul Siegman and I wrote a long time ago. Maybe I should look at it again it has been years since I did something with Servlets and JSPs. Nice to see that it is still maintained. Although I noticed that they have not imported the README, Changelog, etc files or any other documentation at all. Have added myself to the project as contributor so I will now feel guilty if I don’t at least clean up the packaging ;)

GNU Classpath Extensions looks very nice. Have to try out the JAXP support they have. Some new packages that we have to write for GNU Classpath such as java.util.prefs need XML reading/writing support. At the moment I kind of fake the reading/writing of XML in that package and it is definitly broken.

Also found out about a project that Anthony Green is working on RHUG which uses GCJ to turn all kinds of Free Software java packages into native executables. GCJ is really good these days.

Seems that the Free Software community has finally all the pieces in place to provide a complete java programming environment.

A couple of people have certified me as Apprentice. The strange thing is that I don’t know the people who did this. I did email with Raphael about his article but I have never been in touch with sh and claudio. But thanks to them I was able to add my little reply to the article. Thanks.

So I guess I should now strive to acquire the skills and standing in the community to make more significant contributions and find an individual mentor or a community that helps me to gain these skills.

Fun :)

I wanted to post a comment to the ChangeLog and CVS article but since I am not yet certified I couldn’t post it there so here is my small contribution to that article:

When the only thing you have is a cvs log then you might be interested in the cvs2cl.pl CVS-log-message-to-ChangeLog conversion script by Karl Fogel. You should run this little utility once before you ‘release’ or ‘distribute’ your code. It creates very very nice ChangeLog entries. The ChangeLog file that it generates shows precisly who changed what file. And if everybody provides a good commit log entry you never have to worry about when, who made what change to which part of the code.