Introduction, new maintainer for kaffe

[Jukka Santala]

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Jim Pick wrote:
> 2) Make a new release as soon as possible.
>    Version 1.0.6 came out in July, 2000, and there hasn't been a
>    release since (although there has been CVS activity).  I'd like to
>    do a minimal amount of testing, and see if we can get it out,
>    perhaps as early as next week.

So, what does this mean for the Kaffe "custom edition", and the
unification of it with the Desktop Edition announced on July 19th, 2000?

> 3) Clarify the relationship between Transvirtual and Kaffe.org.
>    As a long-time kaffe-watcher, I would like to see Kaffe.org be a
>    very open project, which incorporates code from, and interoperates
>    with all the other free virtual machine projects out there.  I
>    definitely see Kaffe.org as being an independent project that isn't
>    controlled by Transvirtual.

So, how does this fit together with moving all the resources under direct
TransVirtual control? I'm just asking; I don't have a better solution. It
seems that the perceived strong involvement of TransVirtual in Kaffe has
led many open-source developers feel uneasy about it before, and with the
recent pulling of the rug off the open-source Kaffe projects without
warning or, in fact, even announcement still fresh in mind, I cannot
imagine that attitude having changed for the better.

>    As a commercial software company built on developing Intellectual
>    Property, Transvirtual needs to be selective about what it does
>    and does not contribute to the project.  You can expect that
>    Transvirtual won't hold back bug fixes from the free version, and
>    will not prevent others from contributing to the project.

Assuming the KaffePro is based ont he custom edition, these two are
already far too different for me to see significant synergy-advantage
especially on the bug-fixes side, where the Desktop Edition due to its
more open development model even has several bugs fixed that the Custom
Edition didn't (And many more probably still exist). If improvements such
as new JIT or GC modules are held back, soon enough there will remain no
common grounds for the two projects to share bugfixes for.

But then, there'll be amply of time to decide on issues like that once
they crop up, just stating an observation for the record. I do understand
TransVirtual's interest in maintaining their intellectual property
private, and it has already given the "open-source community" what I
consider the most complete and usable Java "clone" presently, for which it
rightly deserves to be commended.

 -Jukka Santala