Ok, so I get a fixed amount at work each year to buy clothes etc., since I am leaving I need to use this money as I will not get it in cash no matter what. So I took along my sister yesterday and went shopping for clothes. When spending a relativly big amount of money quickly is the goal you can easily end up like I have today wearing jeans purchased for 275 Euro, which is definetly the most expensive jeans I have ever bought.

Happy to see so much good work on GStreamer these days. Owen Frasier-Green is back and has been updating the Mono bindings. Our Matroska friends are still hard at work porting GStreamer to Windows, with most of the basics done and Windows specific plugins next on the tasklist. Wim Taymans seems already in full action at Fluendo commiting a Theora encoder just yesterday. Ronald, Benjamin and David is also steadily fixing bugs moving the obscurity level of our bugs upwards. Hopefully we soon have a Ogg muxer ready and the autoplugger code needed to allow Colin to activate tag editing in Rhythmbox before GUADEC along with a GStreamer based Totem working like a charm :)

On Java: I read James Gosling weblog where he says that it would be problematic to put Java under something like the LGPL (putting it under the GPL makes it next to useless IMHO) due to wanting to protect developers from having to worry about the plattform ‘forking’. This is bogus. The Java plattform is already ‘forked’ in the way he describes; mostly due to Sun being slow and incorporating fixes into Java proper. For instance my current employer, Oracle, has been forced to ship its own JRE and browser plugin for the last 4 years since the one available from Sun has had bugs and issues. Only know have the official Sun jdk/plugin incorporated enough of Oracle’s fixes for Oracle to have started looking into certifying our ERP applications with it. And not only have Oracle felt the need to maintain our own ‘branched’ Java for all these years, but as anyone using our software knows we do not support the use of new versions of our own plugin/jre until we certified them for use with the Oracle 11i ERP package. So already today what Goslings ‘fear’ will happen if they make the JVM free software is happening. So basically nothing will change if Sun makes Java free software in regards to API predictability. Small developers will just continue supporting the version released as the official one from Sun as that is all they have resources to do.