No subject

[Chris Gray]

On Saturday 13 March 2004 04:24, listas@lozano.eti.br wrote:
> Chris,
>
> > > As was stated on many e-zines recently, A GPL or LGPL JRE would prevent
> > > any incompatible fork from a single vendor,
> >
> > How?
>
> Because the corresponding patches would be availabe to the whole community,
> so if some "proprietary" change became popular or was proven to be a good
> idea, all implementations (or at least the OSS ones) could incorporate the
> changes. That is, no vendor lock-in. It would not be possible to "embrace
> and extend".

That is quite true, but is not what you (or many e-zines) originally said.

A few years ago there were a number of forks of Kaffe, incompatible in the 
sense that there was only a small subset of the Java language which would run 
on all of them.  Because these forks are necessarily also GPL, all the good 
stuff from these forks can be merged back into the main stem of Kaffe, now 
that there are some good maintainers on the job.  But they did happen.

However it's not impossible IMO that a vendor (e.g. a Linux distributor) 
would take a GPL'd VM such as Kaffe and extend it with capabilities which 
were only useful on their product; for example, the application class loader 
could use features of their package management system, or the system 
properties could be integrated with their user preferences management.  Then 
applications which took advantage of this feature would only run on (say) 
BlueSuedeShoes Linux, and it's hello lock-in, goodbye freedom ...

Sorry to be so pedantic about this, but I am often annoyed by inaccurate 
statements in e-zines.  Then when I try to use their "feedback" form either 
it crashes my browser or I give up in frustration after 37 attempts at 
picking a user name.  So I'm taking it out on you. :)

All the best,

-- 
Chris Gray                                  /k/ Embedded Java Solutions
Embedded & Mobile Java, OSGi              http://www.kiffer.be/k/
chris.gray@kiffer.be                                      +32 3 216 0369