Re: [Savannah-hackers] submission of Peer Agent - savannah.nongnu.org

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 04:39:10PM -0400, Robert Fischer, PhD wrote:
> Elfyn,
> 
> > You must determine whether your project can run on a Free Software Java 
> > suite
> > (see http://www.gnu.org/software/java/ for more information).  
> > 
> > We recommend you to test your project against GCJ+Classpath, and ensure that
> > your Java code runs on this Free Software Java suite.  If it does not run 
> > with
> > a free Java suite, we cannot host your project, as it would have non-free
> > dependencies.
> > 
> > GCJ is the GNU Compiler for Java, part of the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection).
> > The Classpath project aims to develop a free and portable implementation of
> > the Java API (the classes in the 'java' package).  More information at
> > http://gcc.gnu.org and http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/.
> 
> The peeragent system needs to run untrusted mobile code in a sandbox. 
> Unlike many (most?) desktop Java applications, this is one that really
> could not have been written in C++.  It needs a Java system with a
> bytecode verifier and security manager in place.  As far as I can tell,
> neither GCJ nor Kaffe provides a bytecode verifier.  Please correct me
> if I'm wrong.
> 
> Other than Java, the only other system that might provide safe execution
> functionality and is mature enough for this project is .NET.  In theory,
> I suppose that one could try rewriting peer agents in C#.NET on Mono. 
> However, that is probably premature right now.  Mono is not at all a
> mature system and presents problems.  For example, unlike Java, there is
> no common cross-platform GUI API for .NET.  The Windows.Forms library
> runs only on MS Windows; C#-GTK runs on Linux.
> 
> The result seems to be that as of today, the FSF will not support
> applications that require the safe execution of untrusted code because
> there are no free virtual machines with the required verifiers and
> security architecture.
> 
> In the past, the FSF made exceptions to the all-free-software policy in
> cases that no viable non-free alternative existed for a particular
> task.  For example, the FSF hosted GCC and Emacs even before there was a
> free UNIX-like system to run them on.  Maybe a similar exception could
> be made for applications, such as peer agents, that require the safe
> execution of untrusted mobile code.  Then we can look forward to the
> time that there ARE quality free virtual machines with security
> managers, just as we looked forward to the time of a complete free
> operating system in the past.
> 
> Sincerely,

Here is an explanation I found
(http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html):

"UNIX was (and is) proprietary software, and the GNU project's
philosophy said that we should not use proprietary software. But,
applying the same reasoning that leads to the conclusion that violence
in self defense is justified, I concluded that it was legitimate to
use a proprietary package when that was crucial for developing a free
replacement that would help others stop using the proprietary package.

But, even if this was a justifiable evil, it was still an evil. Today
we no longer have any copies of Unix, because we have replaced them
with free operating systems. If we could not replace a machine's
operating system with a free one, we replaced the machine instead."

You see that the situation and the goals were not of the same kind.
See also this recent article:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

If you still think there is a problem in our philosophy, I suggest you
contact Richard M. Stallman at address@hidden


I am not an expert in GIJ or Portable DotNet, unfortunately, so I
suggest you contact the developers and ask them your questions so as
to be sure.


Last, as I said, I removed your project from the pending queue due to
a long absence of reply from you, so please register your project
once.

The re-registration URL found in our acknowledgment of your earlier
registration will direct you to the proper location where you can
re-register your project.

Regards,

-- 
Sylvain