GNU Christmas Gift: Free Eclipse

Mark Wielaard writes "Your friendly neighbourhood GNU did it again. A year ago IBM made much noise about placing $40 million of its software tools under a free software license. Technically these tools, called Eclipse, are great for developing (java) software. There was only one catch, it was build on top of the proprietary java platform. This made it useless for the Free Software community. Luckily the GNU project has two projects that come to the rescue. GNU Classpath, core libraries for java, and gcj, the GNU Compiler for Java. We are now able to run Eclipse on a completely free platform! It is not yet complete, but you can already edit, compile and browse CVS with it. And since Eclipse uses GTK+ it also looks very nice. I setup a page with instructions on how to get this working so you can help us make it work even better or just so you can view a couple of nice screenshots."

Comments

Free Software Community

[lunartik]

A development tool that is built upon a non-open architecture is "useless" for the free software community? But a sort-of-working substitution remedies the problem?

Hmm.

Re:Free Software Community

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Why must you slander us and belittle us?

Well, come on. You do bring it on yourselves, don't you? All the high-minded talk of freedom and liberty just reeks of tall poppy syndrome. Even if your political goals weren't wrongheaded and your propaganda methods highly questionable, the "community" in general, and certain members of it in particular, think so much of themselves that being brought down a notch or two from time to time is good for them.

That said, though, let us not lose sight of the fact that your political goals are wrongheaded and your propaganda methods highly questionable.

"Politically unacceptable" is a poor substitute for "under a license that does not guarantee freedom from embracing and extending".

Actually, I think "politically unacceptable" describes the situation perfectly. Here we have a platform that is free for your use, without the sorts of BitKeeper-style restrictions that created such a stink a while back. The platform is ubiquitous and unrestricted, and generally considered to be appropriate for a wide variety of tasks. And yet you (you meaning the "community") refuse to use it for no other reason than that the people who built the platform do not subscribe to your views on intellectual property and source code licensing.

You may wrap it up in terms of "we want a tool that isn't under anybody's control," but the bottom line is that the concerns of the "community" aren't practical. They're ideological.

You're smearing reasonable people who don't like Trojan gifts with a very broad brush, and I believe you owe us an apology.

I am calling it like I see it. I don't think a reasonable person would conclude that Eclipse is "useless for the free software community" simply because it was built with and runs on Java. That is absolutely radical fundamentalism; it is based on the idea that anything that is not ideologically pure is "useless."

Now I didn't speak personally, and I intended no offense, but I will not be offering any apologies, either.

Re:Free Software Community

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I don't get it, what is it about freedom you don't like? Again I hear slander without specifics.

Oh, man. This could take days. But the short answer is that the FSF does not stand for freedom. They stand for strictly limited freedom. They stand for "freedom except." And yet they persist in calling it "free." That's deceptive. But I really have little to say to you on this specific part of the discussion that I haven't already said in this extremely lengthy and, surprisingly, civil thread. If you want to know what I think about the FSF and what they call "freedom," please click over and read what I wrote there.

The java platform is famously non-free, under the control of Sun rather than standards bodies.

You're kind of proving my point here, whether you realize it or not. You have called out the fact that Java is defined by a company instead of by a committee as being a sign that it is "non-free." That smacks of the "ideologically impure" thing I mentioned earlier. Because the Java specification is not defined by a committee, the Java platform is impure, so all software that runs on Java is impure. And because Eclipse runs on Java, it is "useless for the free software community." This is, as I said before, an example of radical ideological fundamentalism.

It's not Sun's views on IP we care about, it's the license under which the gift software is offered.

Okay, then for the purposes of our conversation I retract what I said about the FSF's disagreements with Sun over IP. Forget I said that.

What you are trying to do is smear the free software community (who concern themselves with providing free alternatives) with warez kiddiez who have no respect for laws they disagree with.

Wha? I don't understand how you jumped from what I said to that conclusion. I didn't say a thing about software piracy. If you're going to argue with me-- for I do love a spirited debate-- at least have the courtesy to disagree with things that I actually say, if you please.

We don't like the license so we won't use it. You are trying very hard to make this seem unreasonable, but it is not.

What I consider to be unreasonable is the apparent "fruit of a poisoned tree" doctrine that is being applied here. As I said before, Java is considered ideologically unacceptable-- this is a vital distinction; not unacceptable on technological or practical terms, but purely ideological ones-- so all software that runs on Java is also unacceptable.

It is possible to release software for the Java platform under the GPL. It is possible to build software with Eclipse and then release it under the GPL. So the objection here has absolutely nothing to do with the real world. It's purely ideological, and I consider that to be unreasonable.

Of course not, you're clearly not reasonable and have no idea what a reasonable person would care about.

Wow, this is getting better and better.

It's an attempt to make it sound like anyone who cares about what license their software uses sound like a terrorist.

Actually, it's an attempt to make it sound like anyone who considers a tool "useless" not because of its license, or because of the license of the platform on which it runs, but because of the specification of the platform on which it runs sound like a radical fundamentalist. Which is precisely what I said. If you jumped from "radical fundamentalist" to "terrorist," then I submit that you may have been watching too much television, and that you might want to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

Ah, but now you have responded to my post personally, and accused me of 'radical fundamentalism' and an obsession with 'ideological purity', and I have taken it personally.

Well... okay. Yes. If the statement, "[The fact that] it was build on top of the proprietary Java platform... made it useless for the free software community," accurately describes your opinions, then yes, I am accusing you of radical fundamentalism. I am accusing you of being more concerned with ideology than with software, free or otherwise. Most importantly, I am accusing you of cutting off your own nose to spite your face.

If this offends you, I am sincerely sorry. I do not mean to attack your character, hurt your feelings, or insult your person. I mean only to indict your ideas in the court of Slashdot public opinion.

You are coming from the perspective that a little proprietary software is ok.

Actually, just to make things perfectly clear here, I am coming from the perspective that all proprietary software is okay. I disagree most wholeheartedly with the FSF's most fundamental assumption, which is that proprietary software, and by extension all intellectual property, is a bad thing. Just so there's no confusion about where I stand on the issues, you see.

But you seem to think that anyone who has a different perspective on the appropriateness of proprietary software is a raving lunatic, and for this I fault you and continue to demand an apology.

Whether you, sir, are a raving lunatic or not remains to be seen. You may fault me for whatever you like, and you may demand whatever you like. As I said before, no apology will be forthcoming.

Useless to RMS, maybe

[Ghazgkull]

There was only one catch, it was build on top of the proprietary java platform. This made it useless for the Free Software community.

If you define the "Free Software community" as the zealotous 5% of free software users who refuse to use software that hasn't been blessed by RMS, you're right.

For the rest of us, Eclipse has been useful (and free and open source) for over a year.

Re:Useless to RMS, maybe

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

It is incredible that you can speak of enjoying free software and curse RMS in the same breath.

This statement is heresy ONLY if you believe Free Software and RMS are synonymous. I believe they are not. Free Software existed well before RMS, and will exist well after he is gone. He only "created" Free Software if you accept his conceit that Free Software is only software that follows his definitions of Free. I do not. He has contributed a lot to this world, but didn't invent the world. Many people don't realize that The Cathedral and the Bazaar wasn't necessarily contrasting the development styles of commercial software vs. free software, but different styles of development within Free Software itself, and the RMS driven gcc was the example of the "closed" Cathedral. Because of the lack of innovation in gcc, especially around the time ANSI C++ came out and it needed large changes, folks forked gcc into egcs, a more "bazaar" style development model, that eventually became the offical gcc. Or are you saying Eric Raymond has nothing to say on the topic of Free Software because he differs with RMS?

Or if this was a troll, nevermind.

Re:Useless to RMS, maybe

[Gumshoe]

Do you not agree that the situation we are presented with today (completely free Java platform) is better than the situation we were saddled with yesterday (almost free Java platform)? Do you think this situation would have come about if RMS et al, weren't so "zealotous"?

The point

[AveryRegier]

I've been following both of these projects for years.

The point that so many have missed is that this shows how close the GNU implementations are to be being a complete JDK replacement. Eclipse is a very complex beast that uses nearly all of the Java APIs. This achievement shows the quality of the years of work that has gone into these free projects. All of this work is now finally ready to pay off.

Congratulations to the whole ClassPath and GCJ teams!

-Avery Regier

I disagree in many respects

[Stu Charlton]

I've written quite a few Swing & server-side applications myself.

"Microsoft and MFC rules on the client side (on Win32)".

MFC is dead, long live .NET. And Visual Basic rules on the client Win32 side, and has for quite some time.

"But now, Java needs to become a viable alternative to C++ based programming on the client-side."

Absolutely not. Java's only main competitor for Win32 client-side supremacy is VB.NET and C#.NET. C++/MFC is a dead-end.

On UNIX, I would suggest it's a toss-up between C++/Qt and C/GTK, and IMHO I think Java's more productive than either (though pre-1.4 X-windows Swing performance was unacceptable).

Sadly, this doesn't seem to be a battle that Java will win on Win32, even with SWT, for a couple of reasons. Microsoft has the industry's talent in developing high-performance Win32 GUI framewords, which will come out for .NET first. WinForms.NET is effectively the next iteration of what was out in Visual J++ 6.0's WFC libraries.

They also have the tools support with Visual Studio. The Java world currently has only *ONE* usable GUI building tool -- JBuilder. And that's not saying much. Eclipse won't have one for some time. The second major problem with Swing (besides performance) was this lack of tools support. I don't forsee a groundswell of tools support for SWT from multiple vendors.

Thirdly, there isn't a whole lot of impetus behind client-side "thick" GUIs in the industry. I don't foresee IBM throwing lots of money at making SWT general-use... the open source community will probably assist in this area, but I'm somewhat skeptical about how much adoption this will generate.

On the bright side, I'm not sure it really "matters". Windows peeps will write stuff with VB like they've always done, the C++'ers will switch to C# (they've really not much choice -- I worked at an MS shop as the Java junkie for 2 years, most C++/Windows programmers there took what MS has given them... there's a lot of shock and dismay when Borland/OWL is on one's resume). The 2nd most widely used GUI framework family will be (gasp) Carbon/Cocoa on Mac OS X. ANd rounding out the list, *nix peeps will continue head-butting between Qt and GTK+ (both of which are still gawdawfully ugly IMHO, quite apparent actually if you run a GTK+ app side-by-side with a Mac OS X application. But I digress).

"I can see them actually introducing more Java extension libraries for other things that Sun did a terrible job on. Collections. Better native threading model. Better I/O model. The list goes on and on."

Whoa, whoa! I disagree with each one of these. We are talking about J2SE 1.4, are we not? I'm quite happy with the collections framework (and I compare this to both stdc++ and the Smalltalk collections library), the java.nio.* package is very sophisticated, and IMHO the threading model is a matter of taste, not stemming from any particular technical disadvantage.

How Eclipse/SWT saved the GCJ project

[Anonymous Coward]

The GNU folks had no hope of recreating a cleanroom AWT and Swing - it was just too bloody big and complicated. It would have taken at least 4 years to create a cleanroom Swing. Then along comes Eclipse/SWT which did all the hard bits for them in C. The result - a portable and very fast Java GUI. Now folks have a very good reason to work on GCJ because they can finally see some concrete results. Success breeds further success.
Compiling your application to a single binary (or .exe if you will) is a HUGE advantage for distributing applications. That 20 meg JRE is a complete pain in the butt for a client to download. It's much better to simply run a 5 megabyte GCJ-compiled application.
Java doesn't suck. Java's GUIs need not be slow. It was Swing that sucked. Finally people realize where to lay blame.
Sun - get rid of Swing once and for all! Swing is a poorly designed GUI tookit and a complete embarassment to Java.

Re:Now take Eclipse, please!

[MillionthMonkey]

SWT seems like a cool idea, but with its close coupling to Windows (Windows is the farthest along -- the other bindings seem to be "under construction"), how is this different than (gasp, choke, gag) J++?

Oh come on! At least SWT bindings for Linux and Solaris exist, they can exist in the first place, and you can assist in their development. How long do you think you would have to wait for Microsoft to release Linux and Solaris versions of the Windows Foundation Classes?