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

opensource java..no sun needed

Posted Jun 19, 2003 9:12 UTC (Thu) by ohanssen (subscriber, #2761)
In reply to: opensource java..no sun needed by judge
Parent article: Java and Open Source

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?

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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).