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Talk to Sun's 'Open Source Diva'
Danese Cooper is Manager of Sun's Open Source Program Office. A Google search on Danese turns up more than 1000 results. She's a frequent speaker at IT industry events and conferences, and is, without question, Sun's staunchest internal Open Source advocate. Sun is moving toward Open Source in fits and starts, and Danese is behind a lot of that motion. Feel free to ask her anything you want (one question per post. please) about the trials and tribulations of being an Open Source person within a company that hasn't yet fully grasped the concept, and how she goes about trying to change that. We'll post her answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions within the next week or so. The only question she can't answer is whether/when Java might be Open Sourced. I already asked her, and she replied, "Sadly, I have no news on that..."
She has a common surname. Here's the correct search, which returns 212 results.
A Google search of CmdrTaco gets about 12,000 hits. I guess we know who would be on top in that relationship!
Don't wait till Sun is finally "ready" to make the Java Platform Free Software. Use what we already have today.
) and you have a great programming language integrated with a free desktop environment.
The GNU Classpath project (http://www.classpath.org/) brings us the standard Java runtime libraries (except Swing, but see below). And they have recently merged with GCJ (http://gcc.gnu.org/java) which allows you to compile your applications to native code. You can even mix and match interpreted Java bytecode, with native compiled Java libraries and C++ code (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/papers/cni/t1.html)!
Then you use the GNOME java bindings (http://java-gnome.sf.net/) or the KDE java bindings (http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/java/
There are even free J2EE things out their such as JBoss (http://www.jboss.org) and Jakarta (jakarta.apache.org). Sun now even includes parts of that project into their own (proprietary) Java platform releases!