[breaking thread here] On Jan 18, 2008 4:18 PM, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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.