SableVM / Harmony collaboration (was: [resolved] Re: JCHEVM SVN access temporarily blocked)

[Leo Simons <ma...@leosimons.com>]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 06:18:28AM -0500, Geir Magnusson Jr wrote:
> >>I'd like to thank everyone involved for approaching this earnestly and 
> >>in good faith, working together to get this problem fixed.

+100. I'm still amazed at how quickly and productively this has been
addressed. Way cool.

> >>As a benefit, we've built a bridge between our Harmony community and 
> >>members of the SableVM community, and I look forward to working with 
> >>them in the future.
> >>
> >wouldn't it be possible to unify Harmony and SableVM contributors' 
> >efforts, in order to have just one JVM and one group of work?

Anything and everything is possible!

I like to think that most of us doing this open source thing pretty much
prefer to do things together where possible and I also like to think that
it is very much possible to do that in just about any way we can imagine
(there's just a "few" of these big legal humps to take, unfortunately).

> That's up to everyone involved, but I don't think want to make having 
> "just one JVM" a stated goal, because people may want to do different 
> things.

Also very much agreed. I /suspect/ that certifying something using the
sun TCK (so as to call it "java") is so much work and that it is so hard
to get a "full, production quality, general purpose" (whatever that means)
JDK that at some point the people interested in achieving /that/ are going
to all focus on pretty much the same codebase...but there is 'plenty of
room' to do different things too. We can agree on how cool it is to work
together, work together on lots of things, and see where we end up.

> My 0.02 is if the SableVM community wishes to come here, they are 
> welcome.  If they find that they can integrate JCHEVM and SableVM and 
> all are willing, they are welcome.  

Yup! Gotta love this open source thing. Everyone who wants to sort-of
follow the apache way of doing things is welcome to come and do stuff here,
and everyone who would really rather not can still take the code and use it
according to the terms of a rather liberal license. The way it was, the
way it is, and the way it will be.

> If someone shows up with another VM 
> that we want to accept, they are welcome...

I heard some good stuff about the one Sun has the other day :-P

> At some point, we'll take a hard look at the VM we want to make the one 
> we make as fast, stable, etc as Sun's or IBM's.
> 
> Also, if we have multiple VMs, and w/ the Classlibrary they pass the 
> TCK, I'd be happy to see multiple distributions if people want them...

Additionally I don't see a problem with having some distributions that
don't pass any TCK -- we'd just need to manage the legal stuff well and
make it very clear to everyone "which is which" and "what is what", but
there is no particular reason it can't be done if there's people who
take care of it. For example, I can definitely see us releasing different
parts as seperate distributions. I can imagine, for example, the
GNU Classpath project maybe wanting to run some of the class library unit
tests we have, and there is no particular reason we can't release those
seperately.

Just a few cents...

Leo