> All your arguments are factually right. But pyschology is at work here, and
> especially in an extremely important project like JDK porting (from my
> perspective, it is the second most important project after the kernel and at
> times more important), you have to account for psychology, whether you're doing
> work on a voluntary basis or not. It just makes things much smoother.
You're confusing the Blackdown port of Sun's sources with truly free software. Sun
has paid lip service to GNU/Linux support to gain media attention and developer
chic, but their supposed support of Java 2 on GNU/Linux seems to be more
javax.swagger than javax.swing, and from a developer point of view, they've
*increased* Blackdown's time-to-market by requiring JCK compatibility (I'm not
arguing that this should be eliminated, just that this is the effect it has had).
If you're interested in contributing to a free project, consider Japhar
(http://www.japhar.org/), Kaffe (http://www.transvirtual.com/), both free JVMs, or
the GNU Classpath project (http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/), which is
providing a clean-room class library implementation.
IMO, if Sun does not come through on their promise of support for GNU/Linux, it's
futile to complain to Steve, Juergen and the other folks working on the Blackdown
ports, because there's only so much they can do with Sun's proprietary sources
without Sun's explicit support. Linux has distinguished itself as the premiere
operating environment for free software. Your assertion that the JDK is equivalent
in importance to the kernel may have some meaning to you, but while the folks who
are doing the GNU/Linux port may be more involved with Sun than you or I, they're
still not the ones calling the shots.
I'd rather see the efforts being expended here complaining that API foo has been
released yet go into developing a free implementation of foo. If you want software
with definite release schedules and true support, you shouldn't be relying on
GNU/Linux in the first place, and psychological or not, whining isn't going to
change that.
Wes
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