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
