On Sat, 3 Mar 2001, Vincent Renardias wrote: > > On Fri, 2 Mar 2001, Alexander Hvostov wrote: > > > Those who believe Java and free software is a sad landscape are woefully > > unaware of reality... If this were the case, why does GNU seem to > > wholeheartedly support it? They even have a page devoted to GNU Java > > software! > > If you were yourself a java programmer, you'd know that there's no Free > decently working Java compilers/VMs. Yes, gcj is close, but doesn't > support yet all the java features, yes Kaffe is a cool VM, but I never > could run anything else than trivial examples with it... :( > I'd like to be proved wrong however, but so far I don't know of any Free > JVM that can run Cocoon or JOnAS for example.
I _am_ a Java programmer. Insult me like that again, and I'll give you a well-deserved line in my .procmailrc. The fact that there are no Free JVMs/compilers at present is a temporary problem. Java is, in effect, non-free for now, but this will change when these projects approach completion. Java is not really a moving target as far as I can tell, so the free implementations _will_ catch up to Sun. > As for GNU's support for Java, it's encouraging development of free > alternatives to Sun/IBM's JDKs, but it's not-quite-here-yet(tm). Again, insert statement about the temporary nature of the problem here. Regards, Alex.
