I met Ian Murdock tonight, and now he knows about Haiku. He also knows of the java 1.4 port to BeOS R5 that was stalled for the following two reasons:

1. Sun quit responding to us
2. R5’s protect_memory sucks.

Either one of those by themselves could have probably been overcome, but in conjunction, and with Haiku firmly in development at the time, it just didn’t make sense to continue.

Over the last few months I’ve been thinking it might be time to pick the ball back up, so to speak. Andrew had contacted me a while ago about getting involved in the new GPL’d code base. I faxed in my IP waiver, and I’ve not heard anything about it since — from Andrew, or any other people within Sun.

The problem is, I don’t know where to start. I don’t want to just make a change to the VM, I don’t want to add a language feature. I want to port the whole dang thing to another platform — and their process isn’t really set up to handle something that drastic.

Which brings me to tonight’s Indy JUG. Mr Ian Murdock was there in the flesh. Oddly enough, he knows some of the owners of my previous employer (Hi Mike!) pretty well from his days at Purdue — where he first started up the Debian project.

I took the opportunity to ask what steps Sun was taking to make the GPL’ed Java accessible to small members of the OSS community who may want to port their java platform to other operating systems. Specifically, I don’t know where to start, who to contact, or what to do — and even if we did — there’s the Java Compatibility tests we’ll have to pass in order to redistribute the code and be able to claim Java compatibility. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t have $100,000 to drop on those tests.

I think that I’ve got his attention. I think Sun (certainly Mr. Murdock) could help Haiku help Sun out.

Sun’s been under fire for not having Java under an OSS license for years. They’ve also been accused of being very ivory-tower in their approach to OSS, making the barrier to entry and involvement somewhat difficult. Think of what Sun, PR-wise, has to gain from helping a little guy like Haiku work through the process. Think of what they have to gain process wise, of working with individuals who don’t just want to make isolated changes to specific parts of the tree. A port to another OS — that’s a slam-dunk for proof of and commitment to openness!

There’s nothing concrete in place, there’s just the -knowledge- that Ian is definitely committed to OSS over at Sun. I’ve been as big a skeptic as the next guy, and I’ve been questioning their motives for some time, but I must admit that after tonight I’m impressed. Sun’s found a winner in Ian, he’s definitely the type that can talk to a C-level manager, he’s cut his teeth in the engineering, and he’s clearly passionate and enthusiastic about where he’s helping steer Suns’ software stack.

So if Andrew, and anyone else in the Haiku community is out there and interested in picking up the pieces of the Java port (aside from me) contact me. This time we’ve got someone inside Sun that isn’t going to roll over and play dead once we get visible progress.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 8:50 pm and is filed under BeOS Java, Core Dump, Haiku. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.