History
GNU Classpath development started in 1998 with five developers. During the history, it merged several times with other projects having similar goals (Kaffe, libgcj). In the past, GNU Classpath supplied its own virtual machine (Japhar). As Classpath was becoming a base library, shared with a lot of different projects, this virtual machine received less and less attention and is now no longer supported.
After implementing the majority of the official Java 1.4 API, the work in the project became more bug oriented rather than API coverage oriented. On October 24, 2006, the implementation of the last missing 1.4 class, HTMLWriter, was committed. The development speed (computed mathematically as the average number of the new lines of code per day) reached its highest ever in 2006.
The name GNU Classpath was originally suggested by Bradley M. Kuhn to one of the first developers, Paul Fisher. At the time, there was great concern in the Free Java implementations community about enforcement of Sun's trademark on Java against free implementations. Kuhn suggested the name $CLASSPATH, which is the environment variable used by most Java systems to indicate where the Java libraries reside on the computer. Since $CLASSPATH often expanded to a path name that included the word java (such as /usr/lib/java), it was a way to evoke the name Java without actually saying it. Fisher and other developers didn't like the unsightly use of the $ and all capital letters and settled on Classpath.
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—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
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“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)