Sun Java and GPL

[Per Bothner]

Mohan Embar wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> This question is either extremely dumb or extreemly
> obvious, and I'm not sure whether it's been asked before,
> but what is the future of gcj and Classpath, especially
> on Linux, now that Sun is GPLing its codebase?

I don't think it it is either dumb or obvious.  But note that
Sun isn't GPL-ing *all* of its codebase.  From the Tim Bray interview
here http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=200 it is implied there
will be holes in the class libraries that Classpath will need to fill.

It seems plausible that we would merge in much but not all of Sun's
code as Sun frees it.  gcj and ahead-of-time-Java is still valuable,
depending on the application, it may need less memory footprint,
faster startup-time, or faster execution, because we can optimize
ahead-of-time code better, at least potentially.

Can we combine ahead-of-time compilation with Sun's HotSpot
technology?  Is it worth attempting?  I don't know.

We might want to reconsider the decision to use ecj to compile
Java source - perhaps it now makes more sense to use Sun's javac.
But possibly ecj is preferable - that is partly a technical
question, partly a licensing/political one, and partly one
of pragmatics.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/