Mark J. Wielaard

Certification

I really need to read some more about the certification and trust metric stuff because I just don’t seem to get it. And maybe I am using the certification completely the wrong way since the results surprise me so much.

I have gone from Apprentice to Master because robilad thinks I deserve that status. Thanks Dalibor! But I might give the impression that I sometimes work 24 hours on Free Software in reality I am certainly not doing that (the last two months have been horrible with almost no time for Free Software work). But I have made some changes to the priorities in my live and I will see it as a challenge to really become a Master one day, but currently I am barely a Journeyer. What surprises me is that the vote of one person can change your status so much.

The dairy rankings also surprise me. I have ranked a few dairies according to what I personally think what is interesting/uninteresting but for diaries that I have not yet rated the scores seem almost random to me. What surprises me the most is that although I have only given one dairy a rating of 9 there are a lot of diaries showing up with a rating of 10. I would have assumed that my rating was somehow a maximum rating for any dairies ‘downstream’. I clearly need to read more about how it actually works because it is certainly not intuitive to me.

Free Software community and Java

It is good to see more Free Software Java hackers on advogato (hi tromey, sab39, robilad, jpick, goran!). But progress is really slow. Almost a year ago I wrote: ” Seems that the Free Software community has finally all the pieces in place to provide a complete java programming environment.” Which is still true but I am a bit sad about the progress we made in the last year. It is not that there has no progress but it seems that people don’t use the free (as in speech) tools we produce but keep using the gratis (free as in beer) stuff that Sun and IBM produce. When looking at JBoss, Apache Jakarta projects or Eclipse you notice that people do like to create cool “Open Source” stuff but are absolutely not interested in the fact that they base their software on non-free libraries and tools. Some of the stuff works with the free java tools but it is clearly no priority at all :( It seems that people are more interested in the power that the Java environment gives them then to use free java tools to create really Free Software. I wonder what/if something can be done about that. Untill I figure that one out I guess we should just try harder to produce the best free tools we can to help people create a complete and truly free system.

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.