Improving Java for Linux

[Dan Lambright]

Nelson wrote:

> I meant to ask why doesn't Sun lift some of the restrictions on the
> *source license* for the VM.

The optimal situation would be to have a compiler and JVM
which were as ubiquous, stable, and reliable as gcc has been. I take
it that a problem has been that Java is not stable, like C is,
and therefore its difficult to motivate volunteers to write
code for a moving target, and those who try get overworked.

Case in point: I would like to use Kaffe for research. I cannot
because it doesn't support JNI. I will probably hack something
up as a temporary solution until it does, but this is not
something I want to spend time doing.

The bottom line is that the free software community has 
been laregely unsucessful in building reliable development tools
for Java, no thanks to Sun. This cant be helping Java's momentum. But
you can bet people in Redmond dont mind.

Dan
http://www.opengroup.org/~dlambright