opensource java..no sun needed [LWN.net]

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 2:33 UTC (Thu) by judge (guest, #6234)
In reply to: Surely? by ncm
Parent article: Java and Open Source

No matter how nice sun is, their jdk still isn't as portable or openly available as any real opensource software...Just trying distributing an opensource java app and see how many users don't have a jre installed.
This makes making your software apt-gettable very very hard.

Or maybe try getting a sun jre to work on freebsd? Or OpenBSD? Good luck.

On the other hand you can use older java apis with true opensource tools such as gcj and kaffe(which is a bit on the buggy side)

With gcj you can compile java apps to native linux/windows/*bsd apps that only depend on opensource libs, so now any user can download and use your app without going through the convoluted process of finding a jre.

I'm doing just this with http://irate.sf.net ...Trying to port it away from sun's/ibm-jre-only stuff like swing/xerces to code that will compile and run with gcj & SWT.

I firmly believe think gcj is a very pleasant way to develop native application with an easy language like java. No Sun needed :)

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opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 8:22 UTC (Thu) by tarvin (subscriber, #4412) [Link]

"judge" said:

"Just trying distributing an opensource java app and see how many
users don't have a jre installed.
This makes making your software apt-gettable very very hard."

I agree. The Java mantra should actually be "write once, run nowhere". Sure, all LWN readers have no problem finding and installing a JRE/JDK. But on most "end-user" systems, you don't see any modern JRE.

And that's not only Microsoft's fault.

Sun: It's about time to make JDK open source.

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 9:12 UTC (Thu) by ohanssen (subscriber, #2761) [Link]

It is actually apt-gettable. By including the Blackdown server in the
sources list you can get the latest JDK as Debian packages. But I really
wish that the Java 2 platform could be available in the "official" Debian
distribution. It was at the time of JDK 1.1, so why not now? Because of
the licensing?

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 12:54 UTC (Thu) by kreutzm (subscriber, #4700) [Link]

Well, I'd like to apt-get it. But unfortunately, I am not on i386, so I am out of luck. And even attempts to port the JDK to alpha have been brought to a grindingly halt by Sun's license.

I'd really like to programm a little in Java, but as long as I have to gamble if JRE is available on the target system, I don't.

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 14:27 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

Seconded - the situation is much the same on ARM. I have some java apps I'd like to run and I can do it with a bit of faff on x86 but on other platforms things almost invariably don't work because they only actually work with sun's JRE and the alternatives aren't quite enough the same, the wrong API version, buggy, non-free or both.

As a result I simply ignore java as much as I possibly can and will continue to do so until I can apt-get an up-to-date JRE from Debian on all arches. Even the blackdown one is no use to me as it won't run on the really old ARM hardware I actually need java on (all last time I looked, but having been burned a couple of times on this - once costing real money and a contract, I'm not keen to return to the flames).