Re: [Discuss] UserLinux & free runtimes for java applications

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Sun, 2003-12-21 at 20:56, Bruce Perens wrote:
> You are correct that I had very little information when writing that 
> paragraph, and have not spent much time with Java in general. If you'd 
> like to get some effort started with people on the list and elsewhere, 
> please go for it.

As Dalibor said you want to look at how Red Hat is handling this.
They are trying to build a community around Fedora Core 2 were they want
to combine the Eclipse, Ant, Tomcat, Jakarta and other free software
applications written in the java language and create native applications
from them with gcj. See http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/

The Debian project is more looking at tradition byte code interpreters
and just in time compilers like kaffe for these kind of applications.
They don't seem to have a clear strategy yet like Fedora has.

The Gnome community is working on the java-gnome bindings for creating
gtk+ and Gnome applications which are explicitly supported by the gcj
and kaffe projects. (It even comes with natively compiled gcj shared
libraries.) See http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1538
http://java-gnome.sf.net and http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/bindings/

> I would like to hear the current wisdom regarding licensing issues of 
> proprietary Java applications running on Classpath and the free VMs.

Everybody is free to run their programs with GNU Classpath for any
purpose. When distributing runtime environments or complete applications
based on GNU Classpath you have to make sure that you distribute them in
accordance with the distribution terms of all software your product is
base on and/or derive from. Classpath is distributed under the terms of
the GNU General Public License with a clarification and a special
exception for linking in certain cases.
See http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html
Specific questions about distribution and licensing of FSF distributed
GNU projects are best asked at address@hidden

> We'd like to support proprietary applications.

We don't like it. We only do it when we think that it benefits the free
software community get more free software in the end.

Cheers,

Mark

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part