From: Rick DeNatale Date: 2008-04-04T20:38:32+09:00 Subject: Re: Sun's Overview of Ruby and JRuby On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 7:11 AM, Michal Suchanek wrote: > On 03/04/2008, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote: > > Michal Suchanek wrote: > > > 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. I think that it's interesting that the community of Ruby implementers (including Sun thanks to Charles, Thomas and Co.) are striving to openly develop a Ruby 'specification' in the form of a growing test suite, while a test suite exists for Java but it's closely held by Sun and not openly available. -- Rick DeNatale My blog on Ruby http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/