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Re: Quitting debian-java

On Sat, 3 Mar 2001, Vincent Renardias wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 2 Mar 2001, Alexander Hvostov wrote:
> 
> > Those who believe Java and free software is a sad landscape are woefully
> > unaware of reality... If this were the case, why does GNU seem to
> > wholeheartedly support it? They even have a page devoted to GNU Java
> > software!
> 
> If you were yourself a java programmer, you'd know that there's no Free
> decently working Java compilers/VMs. Yes, gcj is close, but doesn't
> support yet all the java features, yes Kaffe is a cool VM, but I never
> could run anything else than trivial examples with it... :(
> I'd like to be proved wrong however, but so far I don't know of any Free
> JVM that can run Cocoon or JOnAS for example.

I _am_ a Java programmer. Insult me like that again, and I'll give you a
well-deserved line in my .procmailrc.

The fact that there are no Free JVMs/compilers at present is a temporary
problem. Java is, in effect, non-free for now, but this will change when
these projects approach completion. Java is not really a moving target as
far as I can tell, so the free implementations _will_ catch up to Sun.

> As for GNU's support for Java, it's encouraging development of free
> alternatives to Sun/IBM's JDKs, but it's not-quite-here-yet(tm).

Again, insert statement about the temporary nature of the problem here.

Regards,

Alex.
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