DivaBlog

Most, but not every minute of my last few months have been filled with OpenSolaris. I also attended a meeting in November where the GNUClasspath folks were trying to understand how to gain access to the J2SE TCKs so they can check their work for compatibility. This is very exciting. Now today a friend has pointed out "this". At the same time, our friends in Brazil have finally achieved full funding for the "javali" project.

AFAIKS, this is all goodness. Compatible Open Source J2SE was a foregone conclusion back in March of 2002 when the rules of the JCP changed to support compatible open source re-implementation of JCP specifications. As happened last year with J2EE, there will probably be multiple compatible open source re-implementations. The thing to watch for with IBM or anyone starting such a project is transparent open source licensing and process and full support for compatibility.

My friends have been asking for months why I've not been blogging. The answer is simple, I signed on to the OpenSolaris team awhile ago and its been taking up nearly all of my time. Also, most of what I've been working on has been "not for comment"...until today!

I'm listening to Scott McNealy just now talking about OpenSolaris release under the CDDL. What's more, he's announcing that the Sun Board of Directors has agreed to indemnify the OpenSolaris community for all 1600 patents associated with Solaris! Wow! I never thought we'd get them to go so far. This is better than IBM's grant: all the patents affected are core software patents, not a collection of patents that won't affect the community. And for OpenSolaris we are governed by the same CDDL license as everyone else, including the patent peace provision. Go and read it. This is a level playing field.

So, go check it all out, and you'll know what I've been up to for the last several weeks. More on why I think this is a good use of my time in my next blog. For now I'm going back to listening to the annoucement call....