Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Trackbacks

No trackback.

Trackbacks are closed.

Comments

Sunday 30 December 2007 13:41, by troll :: #

The only time he mentioned free was when he talked about development environments (Netbeans) and their importance. Netbeans is. He did not claim anything about Java itself.

Sunday 30 December 2007 13:51, by hub :: #

@troll: He did write:

"There are many other interesting things to take into account when you choose a free platform to base you applications in.:"

Sunday 30 December 2007 14:18, by Havoc :: #

Free Java is a perfectly usable language and has been for a while, even before the Sun JDK release and IcedTea. The only issue has been whether it's 100% compatible with Sun Java. But that has no bearing on whether it's a free, usable language implementation.

Sunday 30 December 2007 16:14, by Cezmi :: #

I bet IcedTea is way more complete than Mono is. In fact I believe that it's impossible for Mono to catch .Net development. Free software people should act to shape java instead of criticizing it which is what we're very much used to.

Sunday 30 December 2007 16:24, by Cezmi :: #

Also see icedtea.classpath.org/wik... . Yes, IcedTea is not as "complete" as Sun JDK on paper but in practice calling it "not up to" would be unfair. Especially comparing Mono's compliance level to IcedTea's (I know you didn't make this comparison though) would be laughable.

Sunday 30 December 2007 16:34, by hub :: #

Note: I'm not comparing to Mono.

Sunday 30 December 2007 17:15, by troll :: #

"""There are many other interesting things to take into account when you choose a free platform to base you applications in.:""

... of which freeness really is not one. It's important issue only for a very marginal and insignificant group of people. No real end users care. In IS only and only end users matter.

Monday 31 December 2007 00:51, by Mukund :: site :: #

Hub: Java can be made do various things and while IcedTea doesn't cover all of the official J2SE SDK API, it's perfectly usable for a large number of applications already (consider that one of the largest deployment of Java applications are in the category of web applications).

But this doesn't mean you don't have a free software Java implementation (the language). Sun J2SE contains a huge set of APIs and the free implementation will get there eventually, but you shouldn't fault where IcedTea (a fully free Java implementation) stands right now.. many other languages' free implementations offer far less as far as class libraries go. We don't need to wait for Sun to ship a fully free Java. Iced Tea shipped with Fedora 8 and you can say that a decent JRE has found its way to a large Linux userbase.

There are positive things happening with Java, with the free software release. I think we should appreciate and support that, without any prejudice about who is doing it, or for what reasons. Now that it's free, it's bound to get better.

Monday 31 December 2007 08:42, by MJ Ray :: site :: #

I see the troll is living up to its name... users who care about freedom (and there seem to be enough to keep my businesses running) are insignificant in whose opinion? Not mine.

@Mukund: I'll welcome the free software release when there's a complete release that overtakes the Sun binary system, not before. Until then, free java is a bit like a free drug taster. Big praise to IcedTea and the other free java fans for helping to make it happen.

Monday 31 December 2007 09:32, by Thomas :: #

I'm not sure I follow the reason for you stating its not a free platform. AFAIK it is. And other commenters seem to agree with me. So your blank statement to the contrary seems odd.

As you refer to the packaging; I think we might disagree on semantics only then. I mean; if there is no distro shipping an installable version of package XYZ, but there is a downloadable source that you can build yourself. Does that mean its not free? Does that mean you can't use it as a platform?
Was Gnu in its early days not a free platform because there was no binary distribution? What about (the more recent) Gentoo?

I'd appreciate some more comments from your so we don't have to guess as to what you meant with your post :)

Have a great 2008!

Tuesday 1 January 2008 04:35, by Cezmi :: #

Also I'd like to add that, there's an existing free software ecosystem surrounding Java. I think this is as important as as being a free platform.

Post a comment

Comments are closed.