[breaking thread here]
On Jan 18, 2008 4:18 PM, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
and
-- if necessary, for heavy-weight stuff -- Java. All of these are
free and open-source except Java, which still has some proprietary
components that Sun has pledged to get rewritten as open-source (so
that's not *quite* ideal, but hopefully getting there).
Positive news on the Java front: Although Sun hasn't finished all the
stuff they have pledged, independent parties have combined the freely
released Sun material with the open source reimplementations of Java
to produce a fully boot-strapable nearly-complete environment. It even
includes the ability to run untrusted web-applets, which was not
really possible in the free reimplimentations because they lacked the
Java security infrastructure.
Fedora 8 includes this IcedTea java environment
(
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/ThomasFitzsimmons), which
I've found works quite well. (Amusingly, Cortado, the Java player on
Wikimedia sites has problems for me ... Though it ran fine in the free
GCJ environment)
Not that I think we should go headlong into using java. There are many
good arguments against having most than the absolute minimum of
executable code launched from our pages. Accessibility for the
disabled, client compatibility, client performance issues (and
accessibility to people on computers of limited performance),
maintance and longevity issues, compatibility with non-web mediums
(print, etc). I won't belabor this further, since we've discussed this
before.
It just means that the freeness issues of Java are much less than they
were a few months ago, so we're close to one less issue out of an
expansive set.
I'd like to see robust, complete, and fully free licensed Java
installs for Windows/Mac which we could redistribute ourselves if we
wanted, and which we could reasonably expect people to be using as
their normal Java environments before I'll concede that Java's
freeness issues are gone entirely, but that really does seem within
reach now.