Andrew John Hughes wrote:
On Wednesday 19 September 2007 13:07:01 Dalibor Topic wrote:
Dâniel Fraga wrote:
On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 15:27:15 +0100
I mean, I know I can use gcjwebplugin, but it doesn't work for
all cases, all applets etc. Now that Java was GPLed, how much time will
it take so classpath will merge code from Sun so we can have a
gcjwebplugin that works in all cases?
Currently, there is no one actively working on merging code from OpenJDK
into GNU Classpath, so it will take an infinite amount of time. :)
Alternatively, check out IcedTea.
Mainly because I don't think all the legalities of doing such a thing have
been sorted out. In particular, Sun's code is GPLv2 only and the FSF would
like to move to GPLv3 at some point.
The classpath exception on Sun's code would make that less of a problem
for code in OpenJDK that would make sense to merge into Classpath. i.e.
the class library code, as that code is licensed for the most part under
GPLv2+classpath exception, so mixing and matching that code with
GPLv2+classpath exception or GPLv3+classpath exception should be, per
the exception, OK.
If someone desperately wanted (i.e. volunteered) to make it happen, I
guess we could bug the FSF & mjw about a branch to do the work, or move
that work to some other place, like icedtea, and resync from there
(icepath ftw!).
It's not really a pressing issue any more, in my opinion, as cacao &
ikvm have started to switch over to openjdk/icedtea libraries, and I'd
expect other VMs to follow, as their resources permit. It'd be easier if
an icedtea/classpath integration branch existed, but it seems possible
to pull off that big merge without it, judging by Jeroen's and
Christian's work.
Meanwhile, there is a bug tracker full of regular maintenance work for
those of us that can't just switch their VMs to icedtea's class
libraries just yet, so I expect that we'll see more than a handful of
releases of classpath until the big merge/switch happens.
cheers,
dalibor topic
