FOSDEM

We are organizing a meeting which is a merger of two events and what we hope will be the start of a close collaboration of the free software community with the new Sun OpenJDK project.

In the past several years there were two main events around libre java for the GNU/Linux platform. The Fosdem "Escape the Java Trap" event organized by the GNU Classpath community, coordinating technical issues around implementing core libraries, compilers, tools and free runtimes.
And "DevJam", a GNU/Linux distro packaging conference organized by Debian, but meant as a cross-distribution coordination meeting to set common guidelines for packaging java programs and libraries.

The goals of the shared Fosdem/DevJam/OpenJDK meeting will be three fold:

• Refocusing the technical collaboration and planning around GNU Classpath, gcj, kaffe, jamvm, cacao, ikvm and other libre java projects that are working together to provide a free JSE JRE/JDK to see how to incorporate and collaborate with the new OpenJDK project now that Sun has released and is going to release their implementation under the GPL (GNU Classpath's Mark Wielaard will coordinate this session).
• Getting insight from, and giving feedback to, the new OpenJDK community on how to collaborate on shared goals (Sun's Tom Marble will coordinate this session).
• Improve the distro packaging guidelines (filesystem layout, packaging inter-dependencies, browser integration, developer guidelines, etc.) used across GNU/Linux distributions for java libraries and programs (Fedora's Tom Fitzsimmons will coordinate this session).

Read more on the project's FOSDEM 2007 page: http://wiki.debian.org/Java/DevJam/2007/Fosdem