Jonas Bonér

Down To The Bone

1. Jason Zhicheng Li » Blog Archive » Harmony needs JRocket or J9 11.23.05 / 4pm

   […] Jonas Bonér blogged his thoughts on Harmony. basically only thing that could make the Harmony project fly is for either BEA to donate JRockit or IBM to donate J9. […]
2. Nick Lothian 11.23.05 / 11pm

   Both J9 & JRockit use a Sun-derived class library so neither IBM nor BEA can donate that part (which is what Harmony needs)
3. Andrew Overholt 11.24.05 / 12am

   Many people who value software freedom use GNU Classpath. Creators and users of GNU/Linux distributions such as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu (I’m not sure of the status of Gentoo) already ship a mostly-complete java programming language stack built upon GNU Classpath and gcj.
4. Jonas 11.24.05 / 7am

   Nick, that is true (and important). I should have been clear on that.

   Andrew, I am not saying the GNU Classpath is not needed or is not important. My point was simply that it already exists, and would make sense to use in Harmony (if only the license issues could be worked out) , or donate to Harmony. I have (unfortunately) never worked at a company that has cared about using GNU Classpath, more the opposite (but I should have left that comment out since it had nothing to do with the discussion).

   Thanks for your feedback.

   Basically, what I am saying is that the donation of class libraries is a good thing. But it is necessary that one the big players step up for real (e.g. donating the core VM impl) for Harmony to happen, and that the only ones that are in a position of doing so are BEA and IBM.
5. Andrew Overholt 11.24.05 / 9pm

   Oh, I misunderstood what you were saying. Sorry.

   Mark Wielaard and other members of the GNU Classpath community have worked hard (with Geir and others) to “donate” GNU Classpath to Harmony but I believe stupid licensing issues have prevented this from happening. I don’t think it’s been completely written off yet, however.

   I’ve heard many people say “the class libraries are the hard part anyway” and judging by the number of free VMs out there I’d say that’s probably true. I guess we’ll have to see what happens …
6. Jonas 11.24.05 / 9pm

   Andrew,

   I understand that what I wrote could be easily misunderstood. Sorry for that. I do think that the class libraries are playing a key part in this story, and do hope that the license issues with GNU Classpath can be solved.

   But having worked at JRockit for some years I know what it takes to implement an enterprise class JVM, and I do not think it is something that a group of open source developers can do on their spare time.

   I do not think that any JVM out there (that I think that you are referring to), can be seen as being even close to be comparable with JRockit or J9 (or HotSpot) when it comes to performance, scalability, tool support etc. But please correct me if I am wrong.

   But you are right, we’ll see what happens. Thanks for the feedback.
7. Dalibor Topic 11.28.05 / 6pm

   It’s less a licensing issue, then a political one. The question for the ASF is how and if to allow themselves to use and distribute copyleft code, and which licenses to permit themselves to using. That’s pretty much the only issue, and an issue on which outsiders can hardly influence, I fear, unless they are somewhere in the Apache hierarchy.

   There is a strong indication that the ASF might come to terms with the LGPL, so that might be a licensing compromose that would allow the ASF to ship GNU Classpath. Otoh, even if the ASF does not feel like reusing GNU Classpath, I’d bet that someone else will, if the matter poses itself hard enough, and will just do a friendly fork until the politics are solved.

   Given that the ASF apparently has a policy to only accept contributions to Apache Harmony under the Apache 2.0 license, and that license is currently unfortunately incompatible with the GPL2, which the FSF (the copyright holders of GNU Classpath) ships most of its software under, it’d be pretty unlikely for the FSF to license their code under a license that makes it impossible for others to mix and release their code with GPLd code from the FSF (and others). I am afraid it wouldn’t make much sense to contribute it as the rules stand, as shutting oneself out of the GPL pool is pointless if you’re largely shiupping GPLd software already.

   But I am sure if the need becomes pressing enough, someone will have to find a way to work around the politics.

   cheers, dalibor topic
8. Dalibor Topic 11.29.05 / 1am

   Oh, and I guess whoever contributes their enterprise ready VM first to Harmony wins the open source Java cake for good, so come on BEA, go for it

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