I was wondering if the Haiku team has in its possession the unfinished Java port that someone was working on for quite some time? Just wondering. It would be a shame to have that effort wasted. It could be quite useful to work on in the years to come.
The people who were involved in the port have it in their possession and they’re all very much alive and involved with BeOS still.
What do you mean "Java Port"? A port of an Open Source JVM?
red_devel wrote:
What do you mean "Java Port"? A port of an Open Source JVM?
A port of the Sun JVM.
MYOB wrote:
red_devel wrote:What do you mean "Java Port"? A port of an Open Source JVM?A port of the Sun JVM.
So there were actually employees of sun with access ot their JVM source code working on porting it to BeOS?
red_devel wrote:
MYOB wrote:red_devel wrote:What do you mean "Java Port"? A port of an Open Source JVM?A port of the Sun JVM.
So there were actually employees of sun with access ot their JVM source code working on porting it to BeOS?
Not employees of Sun. Java can pretty much be ported by anyone who is capable once they agree to Sun’s licensing terms…
I believe most of the restrictions are on the right to distribute the ported code/binaries publically. As in, they must be evaluated by Sun themselves and put through the “rigorous” testing to ensure they meet Sun’s expectations and quality controls.
There should be some cool videos floating around the net of Java running on BeOS. The project page is located at http://www.beunited.org and one of the devs has an interesting blog: http://bryan.varnernet.com//
I still have a mostly working 1.4.2 JDK sitting on my machine, with the complete source tree.
Andrew and I have been in contact, and we’re working (methodically, and slowly) towards getting involved in the official opensource JDK project. We’re currently in the process of looking for sponsors.
There will be a large amount of work, as we’re several releases behind the current Java version from Sun.
We think we’re better off than we were before though, as we at least have an existing Java runtime we can bootstrap from.
The 1.4.2 code is not FLOSS, is proprietary, and everyone involved in the prior project is under licensing agreements that expressly prohibit the release of binary or source, so don’t ask. 
What sort of sponsorship are you specifically looking for?
To make contributions to the openJDK project someone already inside the project has to ‘sponsor’ you. It’s sorta like AA or Amway.