Shawn McDermott wrote: > amen! The rant is confusing to a lot of people. The statement that > sun's jre isn't free is very confusing to the masses. I have been > developing using java for several years and feel that this argument is a > rediculous one. However, I do think that getting other jre's up to > speed is a good thing.
The confusion arises because the FSF has a very strict definition of "free" - they differentiate between "free" and "free[TM]". I use "[TM]" to show where I mean "free" as defined by FSF and not as the average user (or developer) understands. ;-) To avoid further confusion we should be exact: in the definition of the FSF the Sun JRE is *not* free[TM] and we should respect that. So we invested quite some time for the JRE plugin framework solely(!) to support the integration of other JREs than the one we usually ship, and we did that only to support free[TM] ones. I think this pure fact should convince people that we are taking this serious and that we are interested in a good cooperation with developers that lean towards the free[TM] software movement. The rant I'm argueing against is the demonization of Java in general. I think *this* should stop. Even the guru (or pope if you prefer) of the free[TM] software movement is not against using Java - if the code runs with a free[TM] JRE. And we are willing to support that. > I have installed gcj and I am playing around with it. so far 1.9.100 > does not run 'out of the box' with gcj. That means that there is still something to do. :-) But gcj is not the only way. There are other projects we could try, and the option to provide non-Java implementations as replacements for the current Java based ones is also an option. I still find it accetable if some parts of OOo remain that *currently* don't run in a free[TM] environment. We should wait and see what we can achieve in the next time. I'm sure this way a free[TM] OpenOffice.org package can be achieved faster than by forking. OpenOffice.org is an OpenSource project. And instead of tearing each other apart the OpenSource projects and their developers should find ways to cooperate. It shouldn't be as in "Life Of Brian" where each liberation army sees the other ones as their biggest enemies - and not the Roman Empire. ;-) Best regards, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer - OpenOffice.org Application Framework Project Lead Please reply to the list only, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a spam sink. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
