You’ve probably already read about Sun’s continuing effort to open source Java. And, before I get too far into what I have to say — my preliminary reaction is that this is awesome.

Sun has even made a couple nice ways to provide feedback.

I think quite frequently about the properties that a free Java implementation must have; this, after all, is the reason for the existence of Classpath and gcj. I’m going to make a stab at writing them all down here, in the hopes that this helps the efforts at Sun.

License

What license should be used?

I don’t have a particular answer to that. However, I do have a few requirements to place on the result.

First, the license absolutely must be open in the DSFG sense. This probably goes without saying, but I figured I’d be explicit.

Second, ideally the license would be GPL compatible. It doesn’t make sense to me to limit innovation by closing off the JDK from mixing with an entire class of software. Also, a move like this would be an important victory in the battle against “license silos” and for license harmonization — important because, let’s face it, the opening of the JDK will be a truly significant open source event, the most important one in years.

If GPL compatibility somehow cannot be achieved, LGPL compatibility is still required. The reason for this is that a reasonable chunk of the platform (e.g., all the gnome-ish GUI libraries) are LGPL. This is a much lower bar to meet, I’m sure there won’t be a problem here.

Likewise ASL compatibility is a must.

Geir claims that the GPL would be a bad choice. From my perspective it would not be. True, Classpath isn’t pure GPL — but that is largely an accident of history, based on the embedded systems origin of gcj. My impression now is that with the advent of embeddded Linux, the embedded world has largely crossed the GPL barrier. Beyond that, my focus these days is really on the free operating systems like Linux; GPL would present no problems for, say, Fedora.

One important consideration in the license is what to do about patents. This isn’t really my area; I think patents are pretty bad and so I have a huge blank spot in my brain about them, a spot which is filled with a mixture of denial, anxiety, and loathing. The key is to make sure that the result is acceptable to the various players — corporations and also nonprofits like Debian or Fedora. This shouldn’t be hard, plenty of other organizations already have done it.

Compatibility

Sun worries about compatibility. I hope those fears can slowly be put to rest. At least here in the free world, we recognize that compatibility is very important. In fact, we put an absurd amount of effort into guaranteeing compatibility in Classpath. The whole point, for us, is to make it possible to run the enormous body of existing Java code on free OSs.

Ideally the TCK would also be opened as part of Java. I picture Fedora’s Sun-based Java RPM working much the same way as the GCC RPM: we would run the TCK as part of the build process, and die if it does not pass. This would provide critical quality assurance.

Note that rules requiring testing of binaries by some 3rd party won’t work too well. For Fedora and the like, the ability to build from source is crucial. This is especially true as the kernel and glibc hackers continue to innovate — over the years changes in these areas have caused problems for the various proprietary JVMs. (And, supporting this whole opening process: had the JVMs been opened, we would simply have fixed them. But due to their closed nature we either required workarounds, or simply lived with the brokenness.)

Sharing

We’ve heard that not all of the code will be available under an open-source license. It would be great to get more details on what, precisely, won’t be available.

The sooner we get feedback on this, the better. This seems like a great area for collaboration to occur. I can think of a couple ways to make it happen.

First, if the problem areas are already implemented in Classpath, we could open a discussion on contributing them. RMS would most likely have to be involved — but, really, his reputation is much worse than the reality. I’d support cooperation along these lines (assuming of course that the baseline is met properly: an acceptable license, etc). There are probably a few interesting things in Classpath that would benefit the JDK.

Second, if the areas in question aren’t covered by Classpath, maybe we could put a little focus on them in order to have the code available when the JDK is opened. This needn’t be a Classpath-driven effort — I’m sure many people out there would be interested in this same result.

Governance

There are plenty of well-run free software projects out there. Choosing a functioning governance model isn’t that big of a deal any more — heck, folks at Sun can just walk across campus and ask people working on any of their other free software projects. I’m just not concerned about this; the biggest thing is to have a committment to success, so that if something isn’t working, you change it.

That said, there are a couple things worth noting.

The JCP could be more open. Both Dalibor and Geir have covered this point well. Listen to them!

I’ve read the occasional blog entry worrying about simply opening the process to anybody. I agree with Simon here — anarchy is no way to run an open source project. I can’t think of a single successful one that is run that way; instead, developers have to earn their stripes by a process of patch submission and review. I don’t think Java should be any different; if anything, the barrier to entry ought to be a bit higher than ordinary, since Java is a large, mature, and (presumably 🙂 stable code base. We certainly vet people before giving them access to Classpath, and we also watch them more carefully just after they’ve been given commit rights.

Final Advice

You’ll probably see a lot of random, uninformed, and hostile commentary on slashdot and javalobby. At least, that’s been my experience historically — “open source java” is a big red flag for the bulls. My advice is, ignore the crap and concentrate on pushing forward.

Last week I installed FC6 test 2 on my laptop. I did an upgrade (using CDs) from my FC5 install.

The install itself went very well. Anaconda weirdly showed strange characters while in text mode, but this was ignorable.

FC6 is shipping a new Eclipse — 3.2. This works pretty well; I found a bug or two and reported them, but nothing too serious. So far I haven’t explored many of the new features, but I did notice that I can now background “cvs diff” operations. I’ve been wanting that for a while…

The notification area on the panel is now properly translucent. For some reason its opacity really bothered me, and this is one of the few Gnome bugs I CCd myself on.

I installed yum-updatesd so that I could run puplet. So far it seems nice, though I have to say I preferred the old RHN icon (I’m probably the only person who liked that :-). But, icons always change; I’m very happy to have the functionality. I’m not too good at remembering to periodically “yum update”, you see.

In somewhat related news, I’ve been trying the Gnome sticky notes applet for managing my to-do list. We’ll see how that works out; over the years I’ve tried many different programs in this space, with little success.

Overall FC6t2 looks quite good to me. I’m constantly amazed that this whole process (not Fedora, but the entire free software setup) produces good results — and yet it does, year after year.

A few people responded to the “task manager” part of my last post to point out Mathusalem. This is exactly what I was hoping for — perfect!

In other news, FC6 test 2 is out. I’m downloading it now.

I read about the New Stuff Manager on some Gnome list recently. Essentially it is a way to download python applets (into the deskbar… I don’t think I know what that is) from the net.

The design is rather scary… as in, maybe it will have signatures of some kind for security. No sandboxing available.

Naturally this area is already addressed in Java; there’s JNLP (aka “Java Web Start”; I never did learn what that acronym stands for. Probably, “Hey, This is Cool”). The idea is that applications are described by some XML, can be downloaded from the web, can be run in a sandbox (or signed and then trusted), can auto-update themselves, and a couple other niceties. I’ve blogged about this all before, since I occasionally play around with the netx implementation.

In fact, my goal with netx goes a bit further than the New Stuff Manager: I want to be able to drag a JNLP link from mozilla to the panel, and have it automatically cache the application for future offline use. As part of this it should also be possible to preload the JNLP cache with useful applications. Most of the pieces to achieve this already exist.

What stops me from finishing it, aside from the usual things, is that I’m not really convinced it serves a need. My own experiments with it have been technology driven — it is fun to play with. And that is fine for playing around. But in terms of, say, putting this into the platform, the question has to be whether it serves a user need.

Right now I don’t think that deployment is the most pressing issue facing Gnome. It seems unlikely to me that it is even on the top 5 list… instead Gnome seems to be in a more serious existential crisis, trying, once again, to decide what it is all about.

That said, there are situations where being able to download little runnable bits in a secure way does make sense. I’m thinking about Apple’s dashboard here — an area where applications are small, highly specialized, and perhaps topical or timely (e.g., I saw one for tracking world cup scores). One way to approach the security problem might be to simply restrict all downloads to gnome.org, and then have a vetting process before uploading anything; but this is really second best to having security designed into the runtime.

Speaking of Gnome — lately I’ve been wishing that Gnome had a “task manager”, which would sit in the notification area and track long-running tasks for me. This would let me start something (a download, a build in Eclipse — even a “make” with some little wrapper script) and then switch virtual desktops (or hide the application), so I could ignore it until it was finished, at which point it would pop up a helpful notification. Perhaps the applet would have a way to cancel the task a well.  Is this loony?  Has anybody else wanted this?

After months of running FC5 on my laptop, I finally upgraded my main machine. I’m usually fairly conservative about upgrades. In this case the driver was that Classpath needs some newer development libraries, and I wanted to be able to continue working on this machine instead of on my laptop. Also I plan to move my laptop to FC6 test 2 so that I can test out the cutting edge a bit better.

This upgrade (actually I reinstalled) went quite well. It had a few nits… pretty much the same things as last time.

One odd thing about waiting so long to do an install is that the initial yum update (first thing I run on a new OS install) is huge — in this case, a 600M download. I don’t think there’s anything to be done about this, it is just a fact of life. Still, this is so voluminous that it would almost make sense for me not to do a CD-based install (I already had the CDs… so this time it still did) and instead just install over the net.

After my big update the mirror lists seemed to stop working. I thought I read something about this, but I was lazy so I just disabled the mirrors and pushed forward.

I clicked the “developer” option in addition to whatever was selected by default. Unfortunately this missed a number of developer tools I actually use: eclipse, emacs (!), and I think x-chat. (The eclipse install, with all its dependencies, is ridiculously big. Maybe that is why it isn’t in by default. But there’s no excuse for Emacs!)

I also like to install some of the tools using gcj — azureus and rssowl. And I installed inkscape, since it is cool. Also I like to have the terminal in my nautilus menu, so I install nautilus-open-terminal (this approach is a pain, but I suppose that is the point).

Finally I had to build my own xchat-systray-integration from its SRPM (fixing a couple build buglets in the process). I don’t know why this isn’t just built in to x-chat, I find it indispensible. Likewise, for some reason mail-notification is not installed by default. This time, I remembered that and installed it, but not before I had logged in.. at least this time I didn’t switch to KDE like I did previously.

X started up with the wrong display type and resolution. Luckily I had remembered to save my old xorg.conf, so I was able to fix this up pretty quickly. X now seems to put my monitor into low-power mode after it is idle for a while. Great improvement!

My printer driver doesn’t exist — under FC4 I went through a multi-day struggle to get this printer working. I’m afraid to test it now. I forgot to back up this config file, so I’m thinking I will get to fight it all over again.

NetworkManager isn’t the default — a decision that most likely makes sense, given the wide variety of systems out there. (Perhaps it should be the default for laptops, I don’t know.) I enabled it, though, because I wanted an easy way to hook up to the VPN from my desktop. My old setup for this was rather painful. I exported my VPN configuration from the laptop and copied it to the desktop machine. It’s a pity it isn’t somehow simpler to preserve all this info. I suppose I ought to be doing upgrades and not clean installs.

My overall experience was quite good, much nicer than some of the other updates I’ve been through. We still seem to have trouble with some hardware, but that has long been a sore point for Linux in general.

There’s been a thread on the Fedora list lately about how Ubuntu is more user-focused; it arose due to an editorial. Perhaps we’d see more favorable comparisons if someone here went to outer space…

I suppose the fuss must really come down to a small number of concrete things: proprietary X drivers, proprietary wireless drivers, a live CD, and seamless upgrades.

For the driver issue I’m solidly in the Fedora camp, even though it has been personally painful. Andrew Overholt ended up shipping me a somewhat old pcmcia card so I could make my laptop go wireless again… the advice I got from other folks was to buy a card, but not a very new card. Silly!

As to a live CD and upgrades: we need those. I know the latter wasn’t historically popular in the RPM-based community. I never understood why, it seems like an obviously useful feature. By “upgrade” here (and confusingly, not elsewhere in this post) I mean a real Debian-style upgrade, where the system can be upgraded in place over the net via some yum command. (I did do this once but the experience was mixed and as I understand it this isn’t supported.)

Oh, dammit, I just realized today that I forgot to save my somewhat odd mail configuration. Next time I am going to upgrade (the anaconda way) rather than reinstall. I’m just incapable of remembering all the configuration bits.

I got easily addicted to Phil’s frysk blog. Now when he doesn’t post I get angry. Irate. Enraged, really… lucky thing he doesn’t live nearby.

Write faster Phil!

While in Toronto I wanted to get a demo of the new ftrace utility, but that never happened. I think Cagney thought it was weird that I would ask, since really the output just looks like strace and it isn’t like there’s a nice wobbling window or dizzying 3D effect to be had. In any case the point of ftrace isn’t that a replacement for strace is super-cool, but that it is very, very simple to write using the frysk libraries. (I’m going to install rawhide on this laptop so that I can try it for myself… I have a couple other frysk-related things I want to play with as well.)

I ran across the Eclipse kernel configuration plugin today. I haven’t tried it — and I assume, forgive me, that it isn’t actually useful yet — but nevertheless I think this is a cool idea. First of all, any connection to the kernel is like magic dirt to rub on programs (in this case Eclipse) to make them more interesting. Second, the whole point of an IDE is to integrate the various development tools with an eye toward lessening the pointless drudgery that seems to typify programming. This seems like a natural fit.

I went to the local print shop today.  It turns out that they are switching to Linux.  I asked why and they said “because we hate Microsoft”.

“Great,” I thought.  So I told them I worked at Red Hat… blank stares.  Elyn asked what distro they’re installing (way to go Elyn!) and they said Kubuntu — which, I learned, is cool because it has a Japanese name.

I made a comment about Shuttleworth being an astronaut.  More blank stares… this kind of thing is funnier at OSCON.

Today I finally set up my printer so that Elyn can print from her laptop. This turned into a long struggle and now I remember why I quit being a sysadmin.

First I made a little hole in the firewall so her Mac could access the appropriate ports. This actually is fairly easy — just a config option in a GUI somewhere.

This wasn’t enough, though. It turns out that the default CUPS setup here (I’m using FC4 on this box) needed to have ServerName 192.xx.xx.xx added to it. Without this the Mac seemed to think that the CUPS server was on 127.0.0.1.

During all of this I messed with the Mac config a bit too. At one point I got the cryptic message: get_printer_attrs: resource name '/' no good. Most of the google hits for this seem to be people asking about it but not finding an answer. My fix was simple: delete the printer I had added by hand and have the Mac re-scan for printers. The bug here seems to be that a printer added by hand has a path of ‘/’, where actually it should be something like ‘/printers/Pravda’.