Sun Recasts Java Licensing for GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris Communities [LWN.net]

I take that back

Posted May 16, 2006 17:26 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

I just read Sun's FAQ on the new license. It lists the following requirement for OS distributors who accept the license:

Ship only a compatible JDK on your OS. If notified of an incompatibility, you must correct it and offer a patch or replacement to downstream recipients within 90 days, or stop shipment and notify downstream recipients.

This appears to mean that anyone who accepts this license will have to discontinue shipping GCJ/Classpath as soon as anyone notifies them of an incompatibility, any incompatibility, if it cannot be fixed in 30 days.

Debian has accepted this? Say it ain't so!

Whoops

Posted May 16, 2006 17:28 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Typo. s/30/90/

I take that back

Posted May 16, 2006 17:41 UTC (Tue) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link]

I think they're referring to their own JDK there.

So if you have to port it to your distribution, and in doing so you make it incompatible, you're obliged to fix that ASAP. That would be consistent with Sun's usual requirements to make sure everything shipped as 'Java(tm)' behaves exactly as their reference implementation.

I take that back

Posted May 16, 2006 17:42 UTC (Tue) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link]

Because this question has caused confusion in the past, we want to make this absolutely clear: except for these limitations on combining technologies, there is nothing in the DLJ intended to prevent you from shipping alternative technologies with your OS distribution.

I think that makes it clear that my interpretation is correct.

Bring it on!

Posted May 16, 2006 20:10 UTC (Tue) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

This appears to mean that anyone who accepts this license will have to discontinue shipping GCJ/Classpath as soon as anyone notifies them of an incompatibility, any incompatibility, if it cannot be fixed in 30 days.

If it comes with test cases then it would help our Completeness, Correctness and Compatibility goals. I'll say: "Bring it on!" :)

Sun Recasts Java Licensing for GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris Communities

Posted May 17, 2006 1:46 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

This isn't a free software license. It simply makes it easier for distributions to redistribute the binary JDK/JRE (they can package it appropriately for the distro and then redistribute those packages).

Given that Fedora only includes free software, the new license doesn't really make a difference. The license would allow someone to provide an add on repository that includes binary RPMs of the JDK or JRE for use with Fedora though (e.g. JPackage).

Sun Recasts Java Licensing for GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris Communities

Posted May 17, 2006 6:42 UTC (Wed) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]

Ah, that's what I thought (shame on me for not really being 100% sure of the way "my" distro works ;-) but at least being able to distribute the JDK via respositories like JPackage would already be a big plus. Not that compiling the src-packages is very difficult or anything but it is still a lot of work.

Sun Recasts Java Licensing for GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris Communities

Posted May 17, 2006 13:10 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

Fedora's licensing policies don't differ substantially from those of the main component of Debian or Ubuntu. So even though Debian and Ubuntu were mentioned in the press release, you'd need to enable some additional repositories to find the JDK on those distros too (non-free for Debian, multiverse for Ubuntu).

If Sun wants the JDK in the main section/component of most Linux distros, they'd need to use an actual free software license. At that point, I'm sure Fedora would include the software too.