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Thursday December 21, 2006

Join us at FOSDEM and DevJam

Please join us next February 24 and 25 2007 in Brussels, Belgium to discuss OpenJDK at FOSDEM.

I'm not encouraging you to ~~party~~ collaborate with us just because Sun is a sponsor for FOSDEM or you would get to see webmink answer all the questions you may have about Sun and the Zen of Free (perhaps even learn a new koan!)...

I want you to join us so that we have a quorum of voices to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for the OpenJDK project and indeed the entire Free Java ecosystem -- just look that the who's who of attendees for the associated DevJam meeting!

At FOSDEM I hope we can talk about meta-topics surrounding Java Libre and at DevJam we can dive into technical collaboration issues and work towards a Free Software Base Policy for Java. My personal success criterion for these meetings is to develop a roadmap towards

How OpenJDK can become a focal point for Java SE collaboration
Linux and OpenSolaris distros maintainers agree on filesystem layouts, common launching mechanisms, and packaging inter-dependencies
Virtual Machine and Class library implementors understand how best to mesh with the operating system infrastructure in a pan-distro way.
Java library developers understand how to package their jars and/or native libraries to make as easy as possible for Java developers to adopt them.
Java application developers understand how to leverage the above conventions to deploy their applications in a simple way.

In an ideal world we might have smart packaging that would work on all Free Software distros and we would have the core platform support for all this with modularity hooks. Perhaps these goals are a somewhat ambitious, but even the longest journey begins with the first step.

Your first step is to add your name to the DevJam wiki. Do it. Do it now.

Posted by tmarble ( Dec 21 2006, 07:21:03 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Comments:

Heya Tom! Something to look at for the packaging is the work that the LSB is doing now. They've got reps from Novell, RedHat, Debian, and Ubuntu talking about how to make a unified packaging format for ISVs. I don't think anyone has posted anything yet, but I'd look at the Free Standards Group's web site in the new year for information on the working group. I'd hate to see Free Java packaging have an unrelated tool for cross-distro support. Too bad I can't join you in February - my wife's due Feb 21st. =)

Posted by Jeff Bailey on December 25, 2006 at 06:51 PM CST #