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

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.

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