Hi "theUser BL",
Thanks for the post.
theUser BL wrote:
Do you know who David Gilbert is?
I do, it's me.
Right, he have created a lot og classes for GNU Classpath like
something for Free Swing and so on.
Also he is part of the people at planet.classpath.org
and writes also in his blog a lot of its program JFreeChart
http://jroller.com/page/dgilbert
But he have not only written JFreeChart.
http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/
I can claim some credit for *those* things, thanks for mentioning them!
He have also written libformula, flute, jcommon, libfonts, libloader,
liblayout, libxml, libworkbook ...
http://www.jfree.org/download/
JCommon is a joint effort between myself and Thomas Morgner, but the
other libraries you mention are written by Thomas alone (as far as I
know). He's quite prolific!
... and JFreeReport
http://www.jfree.org/jfreereport/index.php
I did *start* the JFreeReport project, back in 2000, and worked on it on
and off for a couple of years. Thomas Morgner took over the project
(some time in 2002 I think), and I'm really not sure how much of my code
remains in there (I haven't had time to check, but I know Thomas has
rewritten a lot of the core, so I wouldn't expect a lot of my code to
remain). Thomas now works for Pentaho as their Chief Architect for
Reporting i.e. he's paid to work on Free Software, which is very cool.
He's a very talented developer. JFreeReport also leverages other great
open source libraries like iText, so the credit goes all around.
JFreeReport was bought by pentaho and is now part of them
http://reporting.pentaho.org/
It's commonly misreported that Pentaho "bought" JFreeReport. They
certainly hired Thomas, the JFreeReport project leader, at the end of
2005, and moved the administration of the project from JFree.org to
Pentaho.org. I don't know if Thomas assigned his copyright in the
sources to Pentaho (it's quite likely he did, but I don't know one way
or the other). I do know I didn't assign my copyrights in the
JFreeReport/JCommon sources, nor the JFreeReport name. In general, the
project transfer went smoothly, although there were a couple of little
problems (that have mostly been worked out).
Pentaho creates also only free software and only in Java.
They have also extended JFreeReport and working now together with Sun
to integrate it in OpenOffice.org 2.3 !
http://www.pentaho.org/news/releases/20070419_pentaho_adds_reporting_solution_to_openoffice.php
Pentaho are investing heavily in free / open source software, which is
really great. They have a FAQ that hints that they may offer
proprietary licences for some things, but they seem knowledgeable about,
and respectful of, the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence
which apply to JCommon and JFreeReport.
Congratulations Dave, that your software find its way in OpenOffice.org!
I do think this is cool, but as I wrote on my blog, Thomas deserves the
credit for this:
http://jroller.com/page/dgilbert?entry=whither_jfreereport
And Pentaho too, to the extent that they probably negotiated this deal
with Sun, and I'm sure their backing/funding gives the project more
credibility than it had when it was "just" a JFree project.
Regards,
Dave Gilbert
http://www.jfree.org/
