[OSM-talk] Java and freedom

[Nick Hill]

Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> I have spent the last few months working with the GNU Classpath
> community, reporting bugs about errors detected by the OSM applet and
> the JOSM program, and am happy to report that progress has been made.
> I welcome help.

Petter, thank you for your huge effort to make openstreetmap available 
to those using free software. I am glad this has started to bear fruit, 
and delighted to help.

This effort not only makes the code available to free software, but 
opens the possibility to build optimised binaries for multiple 
platforms, including OSX. This added freedom will ultimately make it 
unnecessary for users to pay a toll to Apple to access OSM.

Hopefully, as we move forward, we can maintain compatability with the 
free software Java implementation. If SUN java has a sexy feature that 
we'd like and doesn't yet appear in classpath, perhaps we can get that 
feature working in classpath then once we have it working in classpath, 
implement it in the applet or stand-alone editor.

Petter, do you see any problems in the short term converting the applet 
into stand-alone static binary with GCJ? Making an optimised binary of 
Josm for GNU/Linux, Windows and OSX with GCJ would be even better, 
perhaps we can do that once we have Java 1.5 compatability.