Re: GSoC 2015: VMFlexArray for OpenJDK / IcedTea

[Mark Wielaard]

On Sat, 2015-02-21 at 16:48 +0100, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-02-21 at 16:41 +0100, Jose E. Marchesi wrote:
> >     > 2015-02-21 14:16 GMT+01:00 Jose E. Marchesi <address@hidden>:
> >     > >
> >     > >     >     I would like to volunteer as a mentor for the following 
> > project topic
> >     > >     >     under the umbrella of the GNU Project.
> >     > >     >
> >     > >     >     Proposed Topic: VMFlexArray PatchSet for OpenJDK (IcedTea)
> >     > >     >
> >     > >     > I take it this would be done as part of the GNU Classpath 
> > project,
> >     > >     > right?
> >     
> >     Most of the GNU Classpath hackers do now work on IcedTea and/or OpenJDK.
> >     So spiritually it is kind of part of the GNU Classpath project. 
> > Technically
> >     this will be a project for IcedTea and probably go into OpenJDK from 
> > there
> >     (if the student is willing to assign all his rights to Oracle).
> > 
> > As the GNU Classpath maintainer it is up to you to decide.  In order to
> > participate in GSOC under the GNU umbrella that project would need to be
> > done under the aegis of GNU classpath.
> 
> I won't have time to mentor. But if others have time and feel the code
> can be seen as part of the GNU Classpath project then I am not against
> it. IcedTea can be seen as a offspring of the GNU Classpath community.
> It would be better if OpenJDK participated themselves, but their
> policies prevent them being acceptable to Google.

Let me be a bit more clear. There is some justification of accepting
this as part of GNU since the original experiment for using special file
mmaped byte buffers for nio were written for GNU Classpath and VMs based
on GNU Classpath. The proposed project is to implement this same
concept, but for the OpenJDK class library and hotspot VM. IcedTea is
based on those two and so would benefit from such a project. But
technically IcedTea isn't a GNU project. Which could be a reason to say
no.

IcedTea used to be a fusion of GNU Classpath and OpenJDK code, but
slowly morphed into being mostly a community around OpenJDK based code
(it is bigger than that though). The connection between the projects is
that a large part of the community comes from the community around GNU
Classpath and I maintain some of the infrastructure for both projects.
Historically we have be liberal in accepting projects which overlap GNU
Classpath or gcj based work with IcedTea work since it is all "Libre
Java" distributed under GPL licenses (plus proprietary licenses of
course for everything assigned to Oracle, which isn't a requirement for
IcedTea of course, but it is for OpenJDK). Given the history and the
cooperation between the projects I lean towards accepting it.

If however you feel that this is redirecting resources from the GNU
project towards another project then I completely understand if you
don't want to accept it.

Cheers,

Mark