[ANNOUCEMENT] Kaffe: The future

[Daniel.Veillard at w3.org]

[ Well, I really had trouble sending this to the list, I tried twice,
  and it seems that kaffe.org did eat them, this should hopefully be
  fixed now! First one was sent Monday evening :-\,            Daniel ]

     First, I would like to say good luck to Transvirtual, I hope you
will be successful, and while it was easy to guess that something
was happening, this announcement was really needed to clarify things.

> Having our own company, and not being confined by other copyrights
> and schedules, helps a lot on our way towards this goal. But there
> is no free meal. During the past year, we also experienced considerable
> "exploitation" by others, not contributing anything, but trying to
> make money with our work. Now we, ourselves, have to think about how
> to make a living from that. The way we want to combine free and commercial
> software resembles a bit what turned out to work with Ghostscript.
> And who would deny that this system is a valuable contribution to
> free software, even if it is not under the GPL?

  BTW, even GPL is often non-practical, getting a licencing which satifies
everybody often seems impossible ! Ask Netscape :-)

> The main system (with sources for the VM, core libraries and the AWT) will
> be free for commercial and non-commercial purposes, but not for all platforms
> and not for somebody who tries to make money with modified versions
> of it. Don't worry, Linux and Net/Free-BSD folks. Since your communities
> care for their freedom, these platforms will remain free (at least
> if you don't run it on vendor specific, proprietary HW). The restricted
> ones most notably include DOS and some embedded system platforms.
> Distributing the system on CD-ROMs will become easier.
[...]
  > Besides this, we also hope to get some sponsoring for the free main
> system. The more we get, the less commercial, proprietary work we
> will have to do.

  I guess that there is also another area people who actually embedded
Kaffe into products could give back something on their zero investment
(You can't hide I have the list of the subscribers :-) is to give back
code, not directly related to the JVM but rather the rewrite of some
of the basic classes. I can't understand that they managed to get Kaffe
to gain some speed and kept the 10 Mbytes classes.zip embedded in their
application. So some code has been rewritten which may probably not
completely replace the classes.zip from Sun but at least give a good
bootstrap base for defining a replacement.
  We all need replacements for the base classes, share your code !

> [...] The bottom line
> is that we had to go back to the labs, to develop a new AWT implementation
> which is not ``owned'' by others.  This is our topmost priority, and
> we expect to get it out in March. The whole BISS affair will be subject
> to an additional announcement in the BISS-AWT mailing list.

  Question Tim: the kaffe users haven't get an AWT capable version of
Kaffe for quite a long time. Why not ship the current JVM without AWT
now, it will allow everybody to debug the core while you're developing
the replacement for BISS implementation. We can wait one more month for
AWT, but shipping the JVM alone will allow parallel development and
in one month the result will be more stable, easier to ports ...

  One more IMHO very important point, the Netscape thing ! To put it in a
nutshell, Netscape code will be out 31th of March, but without a Java V.M.
(they can't ship it in source .. Sun licensing problem !). So they are
defining what they call the OpenJava API to plug any Java VM into their
browser. This is definitely something we should look at when it's ready
(I have tried to get something from netscape on the actual spec content
 but never got an answer !). You can however check the announcement and
FAQ from:

   http://developer.netscape.com/one/java/openjava.html

  That's also something which may give Kaffe more momentum in the future
if one can plug a JVM faster than a JDK based one !

> Enough said - now it is your turn. Please let us know about your point
> of view, whether you have questions about the license, want to contribute
> work for the free system, think of sponsoring, are interested in commercial
> work, or think of some other kind of cooperation.

  Well, try to send the actual License term once it's ready,

    and keep the good work !

Daniel

--
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