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

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.

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 …

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.