Vote for a FreeBSD port of JDK1.2 from Sun

Several people submitted this, but Nate Williams was first. In his own words: "As head of the current FreeBSD/JDK porting development team it's been difficult to finish our JDK2 efforts due to lack of help from Sun. In order to try and make JDK2 on FreeBSD a reality, we are lobbying Sun using a RFE (Request For Enhancement) on the Java Developer network to demonstrate to them the number of people interested in seeing FreeBSD as a supported Java platform.". Read on if you're interested in seeing more complete Java support on FreeBSD.

Nate continues, "Please go to Sun Bug 4288745, and add your votes to ask Sun into allocating resources towards getting a native FreeBSD port of JDK2 (and JDK3, etc...) finished.

"Voting requires that you be registed on the Java Developer Connection, which is free.)

"This is good for open-source operating systems, and Java in general since FreeBSD is a great server platform used by many of the major internet portal sites (Yahoo, Hotmail), and would allow FreeBSD to compete as a Java server platform directly with less 'open' systems such as WinNT."

It's worth noting that any support Sun provide for a FreeBSD port should also be useful to both the NetBSD and OpenBSD Java teams as well, so we can all benefit from this work.

Comments

Why should this bother Sun

[Frugal]

As I recall about a year ago this was tried for Linux. The RFE sat at the top of the request list by a long way and Sun just ignored it. What has changed in the last year or so to make Sun more amenable to porting it to other OSs now?

Lobby this, lobby that..

[Kingpin]

I doubt Sun's going to support BSD in this millenium.. Ehm.. Anyway, Sun hasn't even given solid support to Linux, one can argue that it's because it's a 'competing' OS - but BSD is an even more adept competitor (when it comes to networking at least). It must be hard for Sun to want to make a technology like Java popular as well as want to make a 'leading' networking OS.

I say lobby IBM instead, their Java stuff kicks butt.

IBM?

[DanaL]

Possibly you may also want to send your protest and petition along to IBM, who has proven to be both more willing, and more capable than Sun of porting Java to various platforms. They've ported 1.1.x to at least three platforms I can think of (AIX, Linus & OS/2) and their implementations have been superior to Sun's. And Jikes, their java compiler, is already open sourced which may help with the porting.

Dana

An alternative proposal

[jd]

Sun took -ages- to even condescend to supporting the Blackdown team, despite the Linux bug being the highest rated on their system.

Once they -did- support it, support seems to have been minimal. It's not on their list of Sun JDK's, Java 2 has been very slow in coming (no fault of the porters), and I've not seen the enthusiasm or energy I would have expected from Sun. After all, it -was- Sun who advocated Java for all platforms.

Instead, I'd like to propose that the *BSD community lobby IBM, for a port of -their- Java development kit and runtime system. I suspect there would be a much higher liklihood of success, as IBM seem to have embraced the concept of "free" operating systems and even "open source" in a way I don't think any other "traditional" company comes even close.

Now, if IBM's Java software can be made to work natively & optimally under *BSD, Sun may feel a degree of pressure to at least consider the platform. I suspect it was the presence of "clean room" implementations for Linux that eventually tipped the balance there.