Java 1.5 donations

[Greg Lewis]

Hi Michael,

On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 03:06:06PM +1100, Michael Vince wrote:
> I been seeing a lot of VM crash reports posted to this mailing list and 
> I was thinking how it would be great if this project got funding, 
> everyone knows doing work for reward is better then doing it for free.

I would say it goes further than that.  Sometimes people can't do it for
free due to economic reasons and personal circumstances whereas they want
to do it and could do it if they could justify it economically.

> I just wanted to state my personal opinion and thoughts about this topic.
> I was thinking that methods like Andre Oppermann seem to give a good 
> example of how a (arguably) small amount of money $18k US can go to 
> greatly help the FreeBSD project.
> http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpoptimization.html
> 
> I was wondering if anyone knew if there was any details such as a time 
> frame and a rough figure of how much it would cost to get some good 
> results (or even full Sun Java certification) happening 1.5 Java on 
> i386/amd64 as I was hoping maybe I could persuade the company I work at 
> to donate. I also did notice that there was recently a funding 
> announcement for Java 1.5 on FreeBSD on the FreeBSD foundation web site 
> which is good news.

I don't want to say too much about this just at the moment, but I will
say that extra funding in this area will always allow for things that
wouldn't previously have been possible.  For example, there may not be
enough funding to do the certification for an amd64 binary or a
FreeBSD 4 binary.  If you or your company were interested in those
platforms/versions then extra funding would help there.  In addition,
certification isn't a one time thing.  Every time Sun releases an update,
there are relevant fixes and improvements that _should_ mean an updated
binary from the Foundation.  Funding would help make sure that such
updates happen at all, and do so in a timely fashion.

There are other ways to help too.  E.g., providing some amd64 machines
would help in the amd64 example above.

-- 
Greg Lewis                          Email   : glewis at eyesbeyond.com
Eyes Beyond                         Web     : http://www.eyesbeyond.com
Information Technology              FreeBSD : glewis at FreeBSD.org