Re: Java Certification

["james_williams at optusnet dot com dot au" <james_williams at optusnet dot com dot au>]

Per Bothner wrote:

James > the open source and increasingly non-open source community) then you 
James > would
James > have your freedom, which seems to be the purpose of the venture 
anyway.

Per >There re lots of programming languages.  Creating a new one just to
Per >"own your own" doesn't really make such sense, unless you have some
Per >very specific ideas/goals. 

My very specific ideas/goals are philosophical more than technical.  I accept 
your technical arguments, however, from a philosophical perspective,  many 
people on this mailing list have said it themselves that it is highly 
unlikely that GCJ will ever become certified.  Given this situation, GCJ will 
never be "java".   If its not "java" then it must be something else anyway. 

Further to this argument java certification prohibits sub-licensing of the 
code so I'm guessing that is anethema to the whole GNU political perspective 
and GNU license which accompanies libjava.

Designing the new language would be as you pointed out trivial.  Kawa enables 
this now.  Neither Java nor C# are "open".   Why not design the new language 
(and include the things you thought should have been put in) and create a 
process to hash out truly "open" specifications.   I believe that given the 
politics of "java" and the whole JCP that you may even find some backing from 
big corporations, who would like to move out from under both Java and MS.  

I also believe that the open source community would embrace this with both 
arms.

I do understand the difficulties of this proposed task.   But from where I'm 
sitting it looks like MS took all of your good ideas and made them their own.
It also looks like as soon as you guys get even close to being done with the 
libjava implementation the copyright police from SUN are going to be all over 
you.

So I guess whether you think you can or you  think you cannot, I agree with 
you, but my very specific idea/goal is 'freedom'

Apologies to all for the rant..... I'm just having a lackluster day, the above 
was meant to be motivational and not a rant.

James