GNU Classpath 0.93 ‘Dreamland’, a core class library for the Java programming language, has been released with lots of enhancements (free swing, html, corba, new i/o, graphics2d/cairo support). The release announcement also details pointers to supported applications and screenshots, the status and future of the 1.4 and 1.5 generics branches. An update on the Summer of Code student work. Plus some prelimenary ideas on cooperating with the Sun GPL OpenJDK Java project. And the GNU Classpath commitments to the Free Software community for the future of various projects around GNU Classpath, the users and GNU/Linux distros relying on GNU Classpath.
How long do you think GNU classpath will continue to exist? With the pending GPLing of Java, I’m guessing until it finally sinks in that Sun isn’t making up stories.
That being said, great work guys, I hope all of the “good” things from classpath get merged into the actual Java tree from Sun, once it’s GPLd.
Pending GPLing?! It’s already here!! (Thank Goodness!)
GNU classpath does sound like a bit of a waste now though…the REAL java core classes and vm and compiler and everything else is open source, so whats the point?
Are the Java class libs GPLd? I was under the impression they haven’t been yet.
They aren’t yet. Q1 07.
It’s sunk in a while ago
We’re all looking at ways of making things happen a bit faster, I just met Sun’s engineers two days ago, and they are very serious about making everything happen ASAP.
Some of the recent work has been in areas where Sun has some encumbered code in the class libs, for example, so while they negotiate the rights, we’ll keep on banging out code.
Actually, this is wonderful opportunity for classpath developers to stop re-inventing the wheel, to polish existing libraries, and to create new libraries.
When the class libraries are GPL’d I’d contribute $ to someone(s) working on making the font rendering even better than the current Java 6 fonts. It’s a lot better than Java 5 obviously, but still not as good as cleartype, and probably a step down from freetype. Also they could work on improvements on native L&F.
Classpath can take whatever course it wants to, instead of the official sun course, so they could do some interesting stuff yet. plus, of course, the borrowing and lending to and from sun’s java.
Classpath may not be able to incorporate code from Sun sources. It’s license is not verbatim GPL (it has “classpath exception”), and Sun’s will be similar. However exact wording may disallow code transfer.
Yet it’s only a possibility, but it would not be nice though.
There is no problem there, since Sun uses the same licensing model as GNU Classpath and most of the runtimes, so it can freely merge in code from Sun’s implementation once the class library code is released.
In fact, it’s probably what will happen anyway, to let the several dozen VMs using GNU Classpath gradually migrate to a common class library.
Actually, a bigger problem is copyright assignment. Sun requires it as well as Classpath.
That’s not going to be a problem, either. Quoting Mark Wielaard, the GNU Classpath maintainer:
“I deliberately waited a little to let it all sink in and to be able to
talk to several of you and read all the reactions on Planet Classpath.
And to actually see the actions of Sun. They have delivered and having
spoken to several Sun people now has convinced me they are really
genuine. And the FSF agrees with that. We can include any GPL+exception
parts from OpenJDK in GNU Classpath if they are useful. And other GPLed
parts can of course be included in other GPL-compatible Free Software
projects the community is working on.”
from http://developer.classpath.org/pipermail/classpath/2006-November/00…