You could do almost the same thing nd possibly appease Sun at the same
time by setting up a system similar to how XFree86 is set up. Create
the "Blackdown Organization" who is able to sign NDAs and whatever
other legal crap that Sun requires. For those that want to help on
the port, they join the organization and sign a legally binding
agreement that they cannot divulge the information they obtain through
any NDA with persons outside of the organization.
I've been wanting to join the porting effort for a while but it seems
that there is nothing set up to allow more people to help out. I work
at LLNL and have access to some VERY large machines running Linux and
would love to be able to get Java working on them. Since they are
Alpha based, there doesn't seem to be much I can do without starting
from whatever source Sun has made available. It seems that with the
SCSL Blackdown and/or Inprise could have a more open model of
development for the Linux port.
BAPper
On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 04:53:37PM -0800, Matt Welsh wrote:
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Nelson Minar) writes:
> > I really don't want to be too critical of Blackdown. They've done a
> > lot of really good work in a very difficult environment. But the
> > releases and communication from Blackdown in the past few months have
> > been pretty bad. We're fairly far behind in ports. Worse, though, is
> > the lack of communication. We're told a new release is coming out "any
> > day", then don't hear anything for weeks.
>
> I agree.
>
> I have felt for a long time that the solution is to do away with the
> closed porting team, and simply release the JDK source code *and*
> Linux-specific patches under the SCSL license. That way those of us
> with a vested interested in getting Java to actually work on Linux can help.
>
> I am sure that the participants on this mailing list alone have broad
> enough experience, and a large enough set of hardware environments, to
> help develop and test the JDK for Linux. One thing I noticed is that
> apparently nobody on the Blackdown team has an SMP system, nor are they
> testing the JDK against big workloads or anything with many threads.
>
> The thing is, you can get the JDK 1.2 sources under the SCSL from Sun.
> And you can get Linux patches from the Blackdown team. But guess what?
> The two don't go together. The Blackdown patches are against an (apparently
> unreleased) JDK tree internal to Sun, newer than the one you can get
> under the SCSL. I tried in vain to merge the JDK sources with the
> Blackdown patches, but there are too many conflicting changes.
>
> This porting effort is clearly not working. It hasn't been working for
> a long time. If Sun is serious about supporting Java on Linux they'll put
> the SCSL to the test and use it in this case. Otherwise, everyone will
> simply jump ship and move over to using IBM's JDKs. I know many already have.
>
> Matt Welsh, UC Berkeley
>
>
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