Every morning, I take the subway from GCT to 23rd St in Manhattan, which is near the NY Police Academy. Over the last year and a half that I've been working again in NYC, I've noticed the young men and women police cadets as they too ride the same subway, exiting at 23rd St. If you pay attention, you can see gentle change. First, the are just in their uniforms, maybe with their "New York Police Academy" duffel bags. Over time they eventually get a nightstick (or whatever they call them these days.. maybe a RMASIRCD ? "Rigid Mass for Alleged Suspect Influence via Rapid Contact Deceleration") which is neatly attached to the side of their NYPDA duffel with velcro straps clearly designed for such purpose. Very unthreatening. Then come the patrol pads, large, leather covered pads that they are required to carry in their right back pocket, which seems specifically tailored for this purpose.

After the pads come "the book", this *massive* binder which I can only assume is the penal code applicable to street policing. It's huge. Dragging these around, you'd think they were Marine recruits undergoing some sadistic boot-camp routine at Parris Island. Obvious jokes about "throwing the book at 'em" come to mind... Then comes the "utility belt" - gunless of course - that gets attached to the duffel bag strap. And so forth.

A few weeks ago, the cadets disappeared. Budget cuts? Shipped off to Iraq under some "It's not a draft.. really... they willingly sign their stop-loss orders..."-type Pentagon program? Some silly DHS drill harassing the aged and infirm at airport security checkpoints? Graduation? :)

This morning, coming down the stairs to the downtown subway platform, I noticed suits. Now, at 6:30am, there aren't a lot of suits riding the 6 downtown from GCT, just a lot of construction workers, software engineers, and other blue-collar types, so the density of suits were noticeable. And as I looked I noticed that they were somewhat I'll fitting and wrinkled - like that suit you had in high school that fit for the wedding you had to go to in your Junior year, but didn't work so well in your Senior year. And everyone had a duffel bag, but all different. And I caught them eyeing each other, but without real recognition. Well dressed terrorists, pretending to not know each other?

I stood next to one on the subway, and asked him :

"Excuse me..."
"Sir?"

"Sir?"? This is NYC. Who responds with "Sir?" in a NYC subway other than tourists? Did I run into a missionary group? Maybe the terrorist theory has some merit...

"Well, I couldn't help noticing the suits..."
"Yes sir"
"And it can't be a coincidence that a multi-cultural group of young people in somewhat ill-fitting and uncomfortable looking suits, each with a random duffel bag of similar size and contents - judging from the shape - happen to converge on the downtown 6 platform at 6:30 in the morning by sheer coincidence."
"No sir...."

This was the new academy class. They hadn't been issued their uniforms, and clearly they hadn't been instructed to dress to blend in. I spent a few more minutes talking to the young man - what his hopes are (working with the Transit Authority), if he's afraid ("Well, NYC is better than it used to be...") and how to cope with the danger ("You just have to always be aware"... "Isn't that tiring?" ... "I guess it will be..."). I couldn't imagine doing what he's doing.

I didn't get his name, and I doubt he'll ever read this. (I mean, even my friends don't read this...) But either way, to that young man and the rest like him on that train and trains to follow - thanks. You're brave and we're glad you're here. I'm sure you'll make a fine officer and I wish you the very best in your new career.

And yes, I'll be watching for the bag, the pad, the stick the belt and the book. And once again, I'll make the "throw the book at 'em" joke. And I suspect I'll hear a very polite "Yes sir."

(We managed to tie the standing FOO Werewolf record. End of sat was 6:15am. Never trust Jane after 5am.... Imagine you find yourself in a world separated by time and space from your own, where you are a humble villager, seer-less, healer-less, werewolf-less... gets confusing awfully fast....)

To be clear, Sun = FOSS. We have transformed our company and aligned it around the belief that giving away our technology and investing in related communities will create greater adoption of our intellectual property and ultimately redound to the benefit of our shareholders, customers and the open source community. When it comes to Sun's commitment to open source - "the horse is out of the barn". Not only that, it's also had foals.

Be careful where you step. The horse seems to have left other things around. As long as it can remain hidden behind Sun's NDA requirements and the FSF peeps continue to remain complacent, maybe you won't smell it either.

Hopefully they won't destroy Java in the process just to hit their numbers for a quarter or two.

RedHat just announced a program where you can get JBoss App server (free as in beer software) running on an amazon EC2 instance for

"$119/month per customer plus $1.21 per hour for every deployed server, plus additional bandwidth and storage fees."

Putting aside the $119 and looking at published Amazon EC2 pricing, the $1.21/hr is a 50% markup on the $0.80/hour "Extra large instance", and a 1100% markup on the $0.10/hour "Small Instance", which I'd argue is enough for plenty of deployments. The $119 adds an additional $0.16 an hour.

Granted, you do save the costs of hiring someone to make a JBoss AMI for you, but still... amazing.

I guess it's now "was the voice of". John, we'll miss you.

"...but for the grace...", I suppose.

Until now I naively believed that self-destructive doomsday machines were fictional devices found only in James Bond movies. I never believed that anyone would actually create and activate one in real life. I guess I never knew about Yang and the Yahoo Board.

I can never get time back. I can always make another $20.

I've been meaning to announce that I've joined a new startup, 10gen. I'll write more about the change later. The upshot of 10gen should be well explained on the site (and if not, let me know so I can fix it), but in brief, we're developing a "platform" for what is very loosely called "cloud computing". I say "loosely", because the term encompasses a very broad range of technology and services, from basic grid computing to AWS to AppEngine to SalesForce to EngineYard to ... I'm working with some very smart and accomplished people (ignore the guy at the bottom of the page) and I'm lucky - we appear to all share the same views on code, agility, process, technology, product, etc.

What we're building is ambitious - an application server and a database that are designed for infinite scalability. In addition, we're building developer tooling, application libraries, and management infrastructure to help people develop, debug and deploy applications to said scalable application platform. A similar example is Google's AppEngine - it's an app server with a kind of database to which you can write applications, and those apps will run across the Google's resource grid. The 10gen platform is an app server with an object database (keep reading :), and this platform will run across a variety of resource grids - you can run it on Amazon's AWS, across standard managed hosting providers like Rackspace etc (even multiple ones, for geo and vendor diversity), or even run on your internal computing resources.

A key feature of our platform is that we're multi-language. We're focused on Javascript and Ruby at the moment for writing applications, but we have no religious or political convictions here - we're interested in supporting languages that people want to work on. (We are also dedicated to making such languages and related frameworks run fast.) The constraint is that we think that to get internet scalability, standard programming models have to change a little - you can't just toss a LAMP stack or Java EE server onto AWS and expect infinite scalability. While the benefits of AWS are clear - zero capex for infrastructure, dynamic resource availability, reduced operations personnel costs - you still have whatever scalability limitations you started with in your LAMP stack or Java EE server. Don't get me wrong - this isn't a ding on LAMP, EE, or AWS but just a recognition of the challenges we're all facing with our standard tools.

On the database side, yes Virginia, it's an object database. When I first heard this, I had what I imagine is the standard reaction by people that have only used RDBMSs - "huh?". But after playing with it, and thinking about the problem space, I'm convinced that this kind of database architecture is not only nice, but required. Clearly Google and Amazon think so too as their data stores are either object stores or tuple stores. Sure, you can run a RDBMS on at Amazon, but that's just as scalable as your current config. It's clear that an ODBMS isn't going to be the right database for all applications, but I think that what we have is very "fit for purpose", and the RDBMS isn't the right database for all applications either. (Think of how much time we all spend as programmers trying to deal with the RDBMS in a sane way via JPA, Hibernate, iBatis, JDO, Linq, ActiveRecord, ActiveTable, Django, SQLAlchemy, Storm, DataMapper, DataXtend, etc)

Anyway, we're looking for really good people to join the team. We're focused on hiring in our New York office on 20th Street in what is colloquially known as "Silicon Alley", but I'll consider other arrangements. We have some really big and interesting problems to solve, and we need people of all experience levels and backgrounds. The app server is written in Java, and the database in C++. There are all sorts of scalability, grid and management issues to solve. Our application libraries and frameworks are written in Java, Javascript and Ruby. We want to build tooling for Eclipse. We're going to be open sourcing major parts of our codebase. I need core appserver and db engineers, application library and framework engineers, Ruby and Ruby on Rails engineers, Eclipse plugin engineers, QA engineers, QA technicians, technical writers, community leaders and managers, developer relationship managers, etc. The list goes one. I could formally list the job specs, but I think that if you've read this far, our time would be better spent talking. Just drop me a mail at geir at 10gen dot com. If you have my phone number, call me.

This is an exhilarating, terrifying space with exhilarating, terrifying problems to solve, and we have an opportunity to make a real impact. Life is too short to be bored :)

Divorce long running queries. Ruby on Rails typically serves one request at a time and that’s a detriment if there are long running queries that block other incoming requests, said Zygmuntowicz. The workaround is that you have to set up a queuing mechanism so your database isn’t overloaded.

Serving one request at a time is a detriment. Period.

One simple mechanism for queueing requests would be SMTP - have the Rails framework send request data via SMTP and then fetch the next request when the (!) thread is free. I'd recommend IMAP for that - better chance of not losing requests when the server crashes. Other benefits include being able to use Mail.app or Thunderbird in your ops center to gauge real time load - just check the size of your inbox. You could also ditch Google Analytics or Omniture and use something like MarkMail for traffic analytics. You could also let people mail your website directly - save them from having to fire up Firefox.

1. A horse
2. A very fast catamaran
3. Amtrak regional service with 2 breakdowns
4. A MD-88 when operated by Delta Shuttle

I'm guessing he won't mind - it will support his conference and T-shirt business.

However, I want to lock branches once released. We announce to the team whenever we release something, but people make mistakes and accidentally add things to released branches.

Linus mentioned adding a very practical solution - letting me mark a branch as "readonly" in the .git/config file - but I don't think that really works I'd want to protect it in our central repository.

Could I just do something like make gitroot/thing/.git/refs/heads/version read-only? Anyone have any "best known method" for this?

(Taken w/ Elmo tethered to one hand, iPhone in the other)

]]> Travel geir 2008-05-25T14:02:20-05:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/geir/archives/001695_ecma_doc.html Erm. Why are the membership documents for ECMA in .doc format?

But developing and maintaining a good TCK is a huge task, and one few open-source projects are accustomed to.

I think that Eclipse has 30k+ tests. Apache Harmony has a massive pile. GNU Classpath has something like 20k. There are tons in Apache Commons. Clearly it can be done. A TCK is really just a thorough (and if you've used them, not always so thorough) pile of unit tests :)

While I'm confident that Sun still has enough remaining technical chops to deliver the core technology - some of the smartest people I know work there, and work on this - I think that Sun needs to modify it's DNA and get people that not only understand how to market to the development and design community, but also create tooling for designers as Adobe (clearly) and Microsoft (to some degree) - the two companies that Sun has decided to take on, head on - have at least a decade head start on them. Hint I - this will require investing heavily now, rather than trying to limp by on the cheap. Hint II - another walled-garden OSS community ain't gonna cut it because the best OSS tooling are tools that developers built for themselves. (Eclipse, NetBeans (sorta), gcc, ant, etc...). Designers don't build these kinds of tools for themselves.

This reminds me - given the sheer number and quality of Java engineering defections (I've lost track of the world-class rockstars that are just at Google, let alone Azul, etc)... I worry about the effect this will have on Sun's ability to deliver the next rev of Java SE...

Patrick, Danny, Calinel :

Given that fact that the statements contained in

    http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/14/jcp_individual_representation/

are given by a Sun employee identifying himself in his job role, can I assume that Sun is interested in taking this discussion public? I think that is a really healthy approach. I think there is confusion about the basic facts and I think clarification will be useful for the community as a whole.

I think I'll wait to see what Sun's intention is here before addressing some of the problems in the article. After all, it could be a just a huge misunderstanding. Why do I care? Because openness, transparency and the equitable "rule of law" is inherent in the ASF's struggle in securing an equitable Java SE TCK license from Sun.

Hopefully Sun will allow me to publish their answer. Not being able to would be supportive of "A culture favoring closed-door meetings" :)

The UI is half-screen of keyboard, and half-screen of terminal window. What's interesting is seeing how they are learning how to leverage the touch features of the screen. A terminal using the iPhone kbd is a little challenging, especially w/ the small screen for those of us where glasses are required more and more :) so finding ways of incorporating graphics and touch will make this tool all the more useful.

They are using single-finger touch to bring up a neat "grid" menu, short and long single finger swipe, and two finger swipe. I'm still figuring it out, but what I know is nice. For example, short swipes up and down gets you the up/down command history in the shell, just like an up/down arrow would. Short swipe up to the "northeast" is a ctrl-c, to the "southwest" is tab. "west" is backspace, and "east" is space. Two-finger swipe up ("north") is the conf page, down is hide/show keyboard, "west" and "east" flip between the multiple terminal sessions. When you touch and hold, a square "menu" of buttons comes up, and sliding to them either does the function (e.g. "clear"), or changes the "menu" to a set of variants. For example, sliding to the "ls" button - which is darker to indicate that there are options there - switches the rest of the squares to variants : "ls -a", "ls -al", "ls -s" etc.

The results are pretty nice - if you have experience working in a shell, you can go pretty fast. I've only used it for a few things so far - ssh-ing into a server at work, or setting up a tunnel so that I can control a Hudson instance running inside our firewall. The iPhone is an incredibly powerful little computer, and having a good command line makes it more so. I wonder when Android will run on it? :)

"Most successful open source projects are using GPL," Mårten Mickos, former CEO at MySQL and now of Sun.

While "most" is debatable, I think it's interesting that it successful OSS projects either don't use the GPL, or don't just use the GPL alone, but have to modify it in some way to get around the enforcement of Freedom(SM) in GPL so people can use the project.

OpenJDK has the Classpath Exception along with the strict requirement of having Sun have complete copyright (so they can relicense to something commercially useful), MySQL also does the complete copyright thing (how else could they be worth $1B) plus several exceptions including one which I think of as The "We want to use Apache's APR, and we can for our commercial licensees because the Apace License doesn't restrict what we can do, but it's a big problem for those taking MySQL under the GPL" Exception, which I interpret as saying the FSF's opinion on license compatibility should be ignored when it gets in the way. Linux supposedly has some sort of exception for modules (I can't find it), and of course the standard unix library under linux is offered under the LGPL.

So yes, there are a lot of successful open source projects under the GPL, but there are a few others (Apache Httpd (aka "the webserver running the inter-truck" [Apache License], Apache EverythingElse [Apache License], Eclipse [Eclipse Public License], Firefox [Mozilla Public License], etc) that seem to do ok despite their non-GPL handicap :)

Are there actually *any* major, successful open source / free software projects available under a pure GPL?

As a bonus, Max said he'd ship it so I don't have to figure out how to explain it to the TSA peeps at SFO.

Read here

Also here : http://java.dzone.com/news/glassfish-v3-major-win-osgi

Nice evening last night. Dinner w/ Simon and Danese in North Beach. Found out that SF natives store their car keys in the trunk keyhole when at dinner. That wouldn't work in NYC. Hard to imagine why they bother locking them in the first place. Saw friends at OpenSolaris launch party (part 1) at Jillian's and then evening of debauchery w/ friends at HoS courtesy of RedMonk. Thanks guys, and apologies again for my tardiness, James.

Interesting problem on Leopard. I had been having problems in the last few days looking at PDFs on my laptop, but was so busy - and I have a big honkin' 8-core Mac at work - I didn't think much of it. Until this morning, when I was trying to look at the CommunityOne pdf and then upload photos from my camera into iPhoto...

Symptoms were Preview.app starting, but not opening anything. Same with jpegs - double click or "open file.jpg" from command line, and Preview.app opens or becomes active, but no windows open. In iPhoto, I'd connect the camera, it would do it's thing for a bit, and instead of showing me the low-res thumbs on the import screen, I just got little rectangles. When I did hit import, it opened a dialog and said that either the images were of an unknown format (.jpg) or the data was bad. I knew the apps were ok - I had created a new user and tried both - so it had to be something specific to my user. I snooped w/ opensnoop for a while, but wasn't looking for errors correctly. Anyway...

Problem? Well, it turns out that on Leopard (maybe earlier versions as well...) these apps use temp space in /var/folders/{2 char dir name}/{big ugly dir name}/.. so they need to write there. Somehow (I suspect via DiskUtil's fix permissions "utility" which I was using on wed trying to fix a MSFT Word problem) mine was owned by root, and thus as me, nothing worked. The solution was simply to sudo chown -R geir on the directory. Make sure you choose the right one - there is one for each user on the system, I think.

In retrospect, I might have gotten a hint faster if I had looked at the system.log, but that kind of "aha!" is always easier once you know everything :)

Also, there's a thread on this in Apple's forums.

After the first drop, 10% of the screen was broken - the left side. Got another and was going to do a transfer when I got home. On the way home, it fell out of my bag again. Now over 50% of the screen didn't work.

Solution? Carbon Copy Cloner. Attached the two laptops together w/ a FireWire 800 cable, held option on startup to let me boot off the drive in my broken laptop, used CCC to clone the old drive to the new laptop.

4 hours later, had a complete clone, and got back to work. Perfect. Recommended.

She didn't quite mean it that way...

I did the export of the schedule to .ics and imported to iCal. Worked like a charm. Only problem is that it only was my sessions, and not the general ones, like the general sessions, pavilion hours, lunch, coffee breaks, and after hours activities. Silly.

I also got to spend time with Ean Schuessler and his brother Eric, who also was here. When Bruno told me "Hey, Ean has a brother! He's bigger and crazier than Ean is!" I knew that things were going to be more interesting than usual. It was great meeting Eric. These two guys are insanely talented, and inspired at a level that is indescribable.

I have two photo's to share. The first comes from a restaurant we went to sat night, one that specialized in filet mignon, where "specialized" refers to the various ways they cook it. Start with "Chicken-Fried" :

Yes, there's a piece of steak in there - and not a bad one. (Forget the bed of pasta it's one...) That was followed by "filet mignon parmesian", then w/ garlic, then we a yellow-ish cheese, then a white-ish cheese, then madiera, and then something else I forgot. All good, but odd :)

Here's another pic from the gym at my current hotel - it's SP in the evening, clouds and rain :

Congrats, my friend!

Hey, can I get on the OpenJDK governing board? Would be good to have some loyal opposition on it :)

h/t to ColmMac for the suggestion

Why they are doing ME rather than SE? SE should run just fine. :) I mean, Google has Android running on phones, and Sun themselves had SE (or most of it - I don't remember) running on a phone last year? the year before?

They modified the login page, at least here in Manhattan, to explain. In doing so, they modified it so that it doesn't work in Firefox on a mac - the login form doesn't render. I actually had to boot Safari.

I probably won't miss you.

(Hey, Rich... these are the kind of people you need to keep...)

Tom and I have been doing hand-to-hand combat over 'free' Java, open source Java, Apache's relationship with Sun, the TCK license battle for years now. He's a worthy opponent and I really respect him. His new things sounds great, and I can't wait until he reveals more publicly.

(So it's clear - this isn't my photo. I just ran across it somewhere and find it wonderful and wanted to share...)

I think this is one of the downsides of Sun's "Feudal" open-source model. All project models have strengths and weaknesses - I think that Sun's strengths are that they have many really smart people who really mean well, and they are also willing to just pump cash into something a la Microsoft (e.g. Netbeans) - but when the business plan needs projects to be a "walled garden" (e.g. OpenJDK) with statutory control designed or intended, things will get rough at the intercept with the natural ebb and flow of contributors.

I thought you'd be interested to know that IBM has released the "IBM Java SDK version 6" for general availability today [1]. The Java SDK is released across various combinations of Windows, AIX, z/OS, and Linux on IA32, AMD64/EM64T, Power32 & 64, and zSeries 31 & 64 processors. Of particular note is that this version of the IBM Java SDK contains a significant amount of Apache Harmony class library code, as developed by a number of people on this list. So thank you, everyone, for the hard work in implementing, testing and delivering production quality code. Of course, IBM's Java SDK v6 has passed the Java SE JCK compliance test suite, is installed on numerous IBM systems, and forms the basis of literally hundreds of IBM products, many used in mission-critical environments. I think this is a very exciting achievement.

Third, we file patents defensively. Like MySQL or Red Hat, companies similarly competing in the free software marketplace, we file patents to protect the communities from which innovation and opportunity spring.

Mr. Schwartz - if you really believe this, could you please direct Rich Green to give the Apache Harmony project a license for the Java SE TCK. Right now, your IP is being used as a weapon against that community, from which innovation and opportunity spring (I won't bother listing all the Apache software your company uses in it's products...)

(BTW, Evil Geir thinks giving the proceeds of your NetApp lawsuit to the SFLC and ilk is a brilliant move..)]]> geir 2007-10-28T07:22:14-05:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/geir/archives/001628_phone_call_for_rms_phone_call_for_rms.html The Java Trap

And while you are pondering the idea of not paying, don't forget Sun does aggressively defend their intellectual property in court...

(thx to http://www.upgradetravelbetter.com/)

I don't like the segmenting, but I'll take what I can get until it comes onto Joost :)

I found the following clip, his first monolog after 9/11, particularly moving. Not much else to add.

Now, while I agree with Sam's assessment, I don't think that the "C" needs to be removed from "JCP". Now, it simply stands for "Customer".

I think this is brilliant, and now I understand completely what Rich is doing. My alter-ego, Good Geir - who does Apache Harmony - is somewhat bewildered. Good Geir presumes that this is the logical follow-on to the secretly successful but sadly misunderstood "Java Desktop System" product strategy, logically extending it now to the whole company. However, I think he's wrong - it makes perfect sense in the spirit of "go big, or go home". I can't imagine what Sun's partners in the Java ecosystem are going to do, but clearly Rich doesn't care.

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/java_is_everywhere

(I do wonder if they'll be spinning off their server and microelectronics businesses now that they've finally settled on a business plan.)

UPDATE : This blog was referenced on http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/blogs_on_sun_s_new, but I think that the author missed my point - if the business objective is to unwind the notion of Java as a collaborative ecosystem, and turn it into a one-company product (like .NET), then this *is* a brilliant move. The whole fight with Apache - shafting a long-time Java supporter and valued community member by Sun ignoring their JSPA obligations and public promises for the stated purpose of defending revenue - makes perfect sense in this light. Community be damned, there's revenue here somewhere... As my good-twin Good Geir suggested, just change the "C" in JCP to mean "Customer".

So, by the power vested in my by the encouragement of Bruce Eckel, I hereby challenge Brian to... blog about it. Please? :)

I was looking forward to attending this year and hearing how OpenJDK is going, community-wise... it's been slow going, but now that that they've had over a year to get it together, I was curious where they were. I'm hoping that Mark still doesn't claim that Apache community governance is complicated :)

So today it was good to see that Intel and OLTP have made peace.

Anyway, today Boeing rolled out it's first 787. Here's what the head of Airbus had to say :

"Even if tomorrow Airbus will get back to the business of competing vigorously, today is Boeing's day -- a day to celebrate the 787," Airbus co-CEO Louis Gallois said in a letter to Boeing Chairman and CEO James McNerney.

"Today is a great day in aviation history. Whenever such a milestone is reached in our industry it is always a reflection of hard work by dedicated people inspired by the wonder of flight," the letter said.

(link)

Nice.

http://tellison.blogspot.com/2007/06/gnu-forks-openjdk-despite-claims-to.html

I was the one asking Tom about closing down the other projects, as Tom thought it a good thing to only have one implementation.

I can't wait to see how this works out. If IcedTea accepts contributions from others, how are they going to contribute to OpenJDK? Maybe they'll force their contributors to hand over copyright...

Apologies to all in my life and in my Apache family - I'm coming back :)

Joost has to be the strangest and most intense place I've ever worked (and after Bloomberg, that's saying something). But it's certainly the most fun I've had for a while...

Maybe they mean to say that the Final Draft makes the GPLv3 compatible with the Apache License v2? After all, the Apache License didn't need to change for this to happen :)

And that's the 4-star part of the hotel. Guy may or may not come and fix it tomorrow. I'm in the Holiday for the night...

I don't work for Sun, IBM, Oracle or any other company making their money with Java, so my influence on the business decisions made by any one of them is going to be limited by their willingness to listen to outside opinions.

I don't understand. OpenJDK is all about one company (Sun) and their business decisions to try and make money with Java. IBM contributed to an open source java implementation - Apache Harmony - long before Sun ever seriously thought about doing so, so I'm not really sure how IBM or Oracle fit into this. You're going to need to influence Sun. You then continue :

I'd like to see OpenJDK rapidly evolve into something larger, and getting that right will be easier to do with all the interested parties involved inside the project, rather than waiting outside it - which is why it is so important to me to get the runtime projects like the Classpath VMs, for example, and GNU Classpath, to become closely associated with OpenJDK (and eventually Apache Harmony & J9 as GPLv3 happens) as soon as possible,

I sorta got the impression that GCJ, Kaffe and GNU Classpath were just going to close up shop because OpenJDK is here ;) Or is that only Red Hat-led projects? Seriously, I'd like to see this too, but I'm not sure how "closely associated" Apache Harmony will get to Open JDK simply because of licensing and IP assignment problems. I guess one way is to try the path we wanted to go down with Harmony, namely look for architectural alignment with things like modularity.

Other ways? Well, a good first step would be to get rid of the requirement that all copyright is held (jointly or otherwise) by Sun, either by abandoning the requirement, or putting it in the hands of a trusted, independent third party. (Sun is having a few problems regarding IP management these days...) That may give you a big shot of credibility with the above mentioned IBMs and Oracles of the world, as that would help level the playing field - they could theoretically participate in the project as peers, rather than simply providing Sun with re-licenseable technology for free. An alternative would be to dual- or re-license the codebase under something commercially useful, like CDDL, CPL, EPL or such to give symmetrical freedom to users, rather than have Sun as the only participant with commercial freedom. (BTW, J9 is a VM owned by IBM, and not available under an open source license, so i don't quite know why it's included above).

Putting that aside, maybe a good first step of the Interim Government would be to explain exactly what the OpenJDK codebase is (it's not Java SE 6 and there is no such thing as Java SE 7) and who can use it and when as an implementation of Java. That should keep you occupied for a while ;)

However, the blog had a really confused perspective on corporate threats to open source, as well as a bit of confusion regarding their OpenJDK project. Re OpenJDK :

We've seen Java's acceptance made permanent, on servers and desktops and mobile phones and set tops, in no small part due to our decision to use the GPL license (to simplify the Linux/Java combination on consumer devices and industrial applications).

"in no small p