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OK, so you're saying that he didn't actually say what you're saying he said, but one could interpret his postings in the thread in total to have the particular meaning you implied, right?

Then we're just having a small communication problem here

If you actually look at the way GNU Classpath is developped, instead of interpreting the cumulative meaning of Havoc's post on the Gnome[1] lists, it's quite obvious that Red Hat is not steering the project, except by contributing code to it.

They are contributing a whole lot of amazingly good work[2], but a lot of work also comes from outside Red Hat, because GNU Classpath has a very live community of free (and non-free) runtime developers that have better things to do than to follow some imaginary Red Hat party line.

For example, Mono's IKVM is one of the VMs using and contributing to GNU Classpath, and they are definitely not following the same goals as Red Hat, as you can see in the exchanges between Havoc & Miguel I doubt that Intel, IBM or other companies would be working on free runtimes using GNU Classpath if it was a project that was as heavily controlled by Red Hat, as some non-free runtime implementations are.

You see, GNU Classpath allows for a great diversity in runtimes. You can have conventional ones, like Kaffe. Of you can have ahead-of-time compilers like gcj. Or you can have bytecode transition environments to C, like JC, C# like IKVM, or Oberon, like JAOS. You can have pure Java runtimes as well, like the excellent, blazing fast JikesRVM. Or platform specific ones, like JAmiga. All of them are essentially sharing the same class libraries through GNU Classpath.

I'd be very interested to hear your hypothesis on how Red Hat is steering GNU Classpath development in such a way, that people are nevertheless happily writing free runtimes for the Amiga platform using it. Or for Mono, to put up a higher bar

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] Which is again a different project, and as Havoc is not a GNU Classpath developer, you're dealing with the same sort of second hand 'he said, she said' effect that Jonathan Schwartz finds himself up against: people interpreting his words in ways he never said or even intended them
[2] Like going from no swing last year to swing tables mostly working now.