From the other side, despite of the availability of the source code and growing number of FOSS projects, for a long time Java has been considered 'non-free' and hence poorly suitable for enthusiasts of Free content[2]. The problem was well understood at that time, with alternative GNU Classpath being one of the top priority projects in FSF. The interest raised after Sun released OpenJDK under Open Source license. The idea to include applets as part of Wikipedia-like encyclopedia has been published in JavaWorld[3] in 2008, and the Wikversity project (LabsWiki) has been launched near at the same time[4]. It aims to create both Java applet support for MediaWiki (wiki system that Wikipedia uses) and applets themselves. The project page at [5] contains the code of some applets that were all later included into Ultrastudio.org as well.
While never focused on this mission, SourceForge can also be viewed as a first prototype of applet encyclopedia, as it hosts source code, executables and startup pages for many various applets. Good half of the applets in Ultrastudio.org come from SourceForge as they licenses are always appropriate.
The idea was remembered during the 2010 year Wikipedia strategic planing [6] where it caused a hot discussion without obvious consensus [7]. The very similar article has also article has been presented in Advogato [8], understanding, that Wikipedians and FOSS are not necessarily the same community.
All these discussions have provided many interesting thinkings and ideas that influenced the current design of the site. One of the first posts was the note not the usual compiled binaries, but rather initial source code must be uploaded. Server side builds and code reviews have also been proposed in these discussions. While it may look different for the opponents, also they talks were read carefully and taken into consideration. We think we really did our homework before launching the site, and we expect to succeed.
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