FreeBSD Foundation Announces Java License for Free

nt2UNIX writes: "There is an article on Daily Daemon News that the FreeBSD Foundation has announced the inclusion of a FreeBSD native SUN Java SDK and RunTime Environment for the January 2002 release of FreeBSD 4.5 The whole announcement can be found here."

Comments

Java license for Free (as in ???)

[GGardner]

Well, it isn't free as in speech, cause we don't get source code, which means it is x86 only (amoung other issues).

And the FreeBSD team had to pay $3k in legal fees to lawyers to wrangle licensing terms, so it is hardly free as in beer.

C# for Freebsd from Microsoft!

[bob1000]

http://www.microsoft.com/partner/products/microsof tnet/SharedSourceCsharpCLIFAQ.asp

Couldn't believe it myself. Guess they are just trying to stick it to linux with that "[Freebsd] has historically encouraged unencumbered experimentation" comment.

Re:Hm... don't know.

[rusti999]

Make a clear distinction between specification and implementation. Sun has made the specification for Java open for all to see. JDK is an implementation of the Java platform that happens to be written at Sun. By no means this is the only way to develop and use Java. For instance, you can grab Jikes compiler, compile your Java program, and run it on Jalapeno VM. You are even allowed to write your own implementation of the compiler and the VM. One catch is, if you want your implementation to be certified as 100% Pure Java, you need to pass the Java Compatibility Kit (JCK), which you need to license from Sun.

Re:Jalepeno/Jikes RVM no good for most... (yet?)

[Frogg]

It's quite likely that most real world Java programs won't run on Jalepeno (aka: Jikes RVM) -- according to the Jikes RVM Q&A Overview

[...] The Jikes RVM is inadequate for programmers who need a complete Java platform, since it has incomplete functionality. The Jikes RVM does not support many libraries (e.g., AWT, Swing, J2EE), user-defined class loaders, security manager, bytecode verification, and many other features that need to be present in a production virtual machine.

[...] The Jikes RVM does not provide a complete platform that conforms to the Java Virtual Machine specification.

[...] It was not written to be a complete Java VM.

Whilst it would be possible to bring Jalepeno up to these standards of functionality with a team of open source programmers, in reality it was never designed to be a complete JVM (it's a research 'toy') - the work involved to make these changes would not be trivial.

That said, it is open sourced, and as the old addage goes "where there's a will there's a way".... so perhaps Jalepeno will (eventually) become a full spec JVM?

Re:Hm... don't know.

[peter hoffman]

It has been SUBMITTED to the ECMA (not IEEE), but I'd like to see link to info that it actually has been APPROVED as a standard. The last spec document I saw had the entire chapter on exceptions missing, for instance.

The difference between submitted and approved is an important point so I checked for the current status at ECMA where the NEWS link on the front page led to this:

Assembly met in Montreux on 112the December 2001, and approved 33 revised and 7 new Standards. Among the new Standards, the files of Standard ECMA-334, C# Language Specification, and Standard ECMA-335, Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), are already available in this web site and can be freely downloaded.

An ECMA TR, ECMA TR/84, related to Standard ECMA-335, has also been approved and can be found here.