From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2008-04-04T20:11:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Sun's Overview of Ruby and JRuby

On 03/04/2008, Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@sun.com> wrote:
> Michal Suchanek wrote:
>
> > Well, the situation with Java is much better than it used to be. The
> > code is now opensource (mostly), and this will hopefully make it
> > possible to run Java on more exotic platforms releiving the most
> > painful grief with the proprietary platform.
> >
> > However, Sun has made sure their implementation is the only one even
> > if opensource.
> >
>
>  The only one? You do know there's dozens of JVM implementations for just
> about every platform imaginable, right?
>

Sure there are. Not dozens but a few at least. They are either
commercial (and bought the test suite license and probably license for
large parts of the implementation from Sun, and work only on that
platform) or don't work.

And the likely reason is that you cannot use the test suite, and
consequently the spec to develop an alternative opensource
implementation. Or why else would glibc be one of the most advanced
libcs and gij one of the poorest JVMs?

Pragmatically the OpenJDK should be free enough once finished.
However, Java is still not a free platform as it does not have a free
standard. As opposed to, say HTML or ECMAscript which are free for
everyone to implement.

Thanks

Michal