Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Ian McKellar <yakk yakk net>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 07:55, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 00:05, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> > 
> > With the refusal of Sun to open up Java, that pretty much excludes it
> > from consideration as the base of implementing VM+obj system.
> 
> Slow down - they haven't open sourced their implementation. We have
> piles of free Java VMs, though.

But this isn't good enough. Sun claims to hold a bunch of IP over the
Java language, the Java VM and the Java core platform. For a large sum
of money and your first-born they'll let you license it, provided you
pass their testsuite. Actually licensing their code costs even more and
three or four 

If we want to include Java widely as far as I can see our options are:
 - Convince Sun to freely license the Java IP for free software
projects.
 - Have someone pay for the licensing and the work to bring a free
implementation like gcj up to spec.
 - Convince IBM to donate the license for a free implementation - IBM
also have the right to license Java apparently.

And IBM seem to be a little bit more on the ball than Sun.

Ian