Dalibor, first I wanted to thank you for the extensive comment. I agree with most of it.
quoting (my strong markup):
FSF has been instrumental in voicing the need for open source Java loud and clear, and getting people on writing the code for it, while it was still unfashionably “idealistic” to do so :). The ASF has been instrumental in making the JCP suck a lot less, while that work was still seen as unfashionably “pragmatic”. :) OpenJDK has been instrumental in removing all sorts of legalese from the JCK license, and I think it will continue to serve the community well in that respect, among many other things.
I agree that the poles you mentioned, idealistic and pragmatics, were the way we all were playing two or three years ago. I tend to agree that OpenJDK is being useful to clean legal terms and ease the use of Sun’s JDK in linux distributions. When I find a problem, and from the things I quote in the main entry I guess you agree, is when Sun uses OpenJDK to get all people staring at the screen, waiting for the film to start... for several years, and they even work hard to stop harmony, which was not waiting for OpenJDK to happen. Getting to the point of bending hard the JSPA rules.
What I’m trying to stick in the wall with this post is a message to avoid the framing of “Java is free, those ASF people is just jealous” which seems to be arising continuously and is clearly wrong. Division in the FLOSS (as people here in Europe uses to say) is not a way forward, and I think that stalling harmony, kaffe or GCJ development goes against the very principles of evolutionary software, and is very bad.
With regards to your answer to Davanum, I think the ASF has enough problems trying to certify Harmony to go into more radical fights right now. After all, and as you just said, we are^Wused to be the pragmatics. Though it looks like the roles are somehow reversing. Interesting times. :)
Dims, welcome, and thanks for passing by.
I have no doubts (but I’m not even officer currently) that the ASF will get out of the JCP in the moment that the perception that it is not useful for getting things done to the membership and users of our software gets prevalent. For the moment it is only a minority thinking this way, and there are (optimists? realists? ) that think that there is room for progress inside the JCP.
As an example, two years ago I installed blojsom for my English blog, in a failed attempt. 4 years ago I used JSPWiki for my wiki/blog in Spanish. Now I’m migrating all to mombo, which is mostly python but, the way it is designed, could morph into a mixture of python, ruby, erlang, php, whatever in little time.
Posted by Santiago Gala