libgcj and GNU Classpath

[Anthony Green <green at cygnus dot com>]

The FSF and Cygnus have agreed, in principle, to merge the libgcj and
Classpath projects together.

The general framework:

1. libgcj and Classpath will both change licensing terms to the GPL
   with the following exception:

 /* As a special exception, if you link this library with other files
    to produce an executable, this library does not by itself cause
    the resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General Public
    License.  This exception does not however invalidate any other
    reasons why the executable file might be covered by the GNU
    General Public License.  */

2. Cygnus will assign all of the libgcj code it owns to the Free
   Software Foundation.  All future contributions will be assigned to
   the Free Software Foundation.

3. libgcj, which includes an execution environment for programs
   written in the Java programming language, will likely be merged
   into GCC proper.

As an initial integration solution, we'd like for Classpath to act as
an upstream source provider for libgcj.  We'd add a make target to
Classpath which would build a tar-ball of source suitable for
importing into libgcj.  All source changes would go into the Classpath
CVS tree, and the libgcj tree would be periodically updated.

Another possibility is that we totally merge libgcj's class libraries
and Classpath together using Classpath's VM integration hooks.  Such
integration, of course, would have to result in an environment that is
as fast as libgcj's current hooks between the class libraries and the
gcj execution environment.

Help merging our projects together will be greatly appreciated.  We
need to address overlapping classes and make sure that only the best
portions of our class libraries exist in the merged distribution.

This is a good day for the free software movement.

Paul Fisher
Anthony Green

-- 
Anthony Green                                               Cygnus Solutions
                                                       Sunnyvale, California