Here's what he said:
I polled the group that have put their name to the petition at Apache, and they are all Mac users. These poor people are so sick of the Apple support that they want to write something decent themselves so they aren't behind the times all the time ;) ;) ;)
True scientific method there, to be sure, and Dion's sense of humour is a little hard for me to parse, so he may have been being funny and I just can't tell... but I'll play the dunce card and pretend he's being serious without admitting I think he IS being serious.
If he's right, then the Apple users behind Harmony need help. Harmony is being proposed as a complete rewrite of a JVM, a very difficult task indeed, even given the coding skills the project supporters have.
They'd be far, far better off reviving Blackdown or just porting the Mustang release to the Mac. Less work, and you lose the rabid look of the FSF'er.
what's your beef with open source man? Do you only use commercial
software?
f
I don't have a "beef" with open source. On the contrary, actually. I've
written quite a bit of it: parts of OpenSymphony, RSSLibJ,
commons-feedparser, I'm part of Rome, I wrote lucenerar...
I just don't have a loyalty to it where it's not due, and I hate wasted effort.
Blackdown uses Sun's HotSpot VM and I think it uses a modified version of
Sun's JDK as well.
Keith Lea [keith@cs.oswego.edu]