Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on October 07, 2003 02:54 AM
"Several clean-room JVMs"? Name one! Or rather, name one that contains anything that isn't already done almost as well by Free Software.
Sure, the VMs themselves are probably clean-roomish, but the Free Software community has several good free VMs already: Kaffe, gcj/gij, orp, IKVM/mono, etc.
What the Free Software community is missing are the libraries, especially the huge ones like Swing that are almost impossible to cleanroom (just ask the Classpath developers). IBM sure as hell don't have a cleanroom Swing implementation!
You seem to be suggesting that just because IBM hasn't "freed" the existing cleanroom VMs it may have (which would be useless anyway because they depend on Sun's libraries, and duplicate functionality that already exists Free), they wouldn't free the whole of Java (which would be *extremely* useful) if they had the opportunity. Of course I can't prove that they would - but your argument is a sheer non-sequitur. There's plenty of logical reasons not to release the VMs they may have now that wouldn't apply if they had full rights to the whole platform.
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Re:IBM has been waiting for this...
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on October 07, 2003 02:54 AMSure, the VMs themselves are probably clean-roomish, but the Free Software community has several good free VMs already: Kaffe, gcj/gij, orp, IKVM/mono, etc.
What the Free Software community is missing are the libraries, especially the huge ones like Swing that are almost impossible to cleanroom (just ask the Classpath developers). IBM sure as hell don't have a cleanroom Swing implementation!
You seem to be suggesting that just because IBM hasn't "freed" the existing cleanroom VMs it may have (which would be useless anyway because they depend on Sun's libraries, and duplicate functionality that already exists Free), they wouldn't free the whole of Java (which would be *extremely* useful) if they had the opportunity. Of course I can't prove that they would - but your argument is a sheer non-sequitur. There's plenty of logical reasons not to release the VMs they may have now that wouldn't apply if they had full rights to the whole platform.
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