[OSM-talk] Java and freedom

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Nick Hill]
> 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.

Great.  To help, set up a test framework and test the OSM tools
regularly with the latest development versions of GNU Classpath, and
report all issues to the developers using IRC and bugzilla.

> Hopefully, as we move forward, we can maintain compatability with
> the free software Java implementation.

Yes, I hope we can do that.  But for that to happen, I suspect we need
commitment from those coding the OSM tools.  The only way to maintain
compatibility is for them to test the OSM tools using the free
software java implementations. :)

> 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.

The GNU Classpath developers are very responsive, though overworked,
so I have good hopes we will get the features we need into the free
software tools although it will take some time.

> Petter, do you see any problems in the short term converting the
> applet into stand-alone static binary with GCJ?

Yes.  The applet started working just recently with the CVS version of
GNU Classpath, and the CVS version of GCJ was recently merged with GNU
Classpath version 0.91, so several of the needed features are missing
in GCJ.  I hope version 0.92 will work when it is release 1-2 months
from now, and when that again is merged into GCJ, we should get a
version of GCJ capable of running the applet.  GCJ have a very slow
release cycle (1-2 times a year), so it will take a while before we
can use it.

> 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.

I suspect this should be possible sometime next spring, if not sooner.
I believe we need 1-2 releases (so 4 months) of GNU Classpath and then
the next release of GCJ (+2-6 months) before we can do that with the
release version of GCJ.

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen