Java becomes more distributable

Posted May 18, 2006 9:40 UTC (Thu) by scrosland (guest, #4426)
Parent article: Java becomes more distributable

Simon Phipps has some interesting points and reponses to comments here: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=jdk_on_gnu...

In particular, this is clarifies co-existence with other Java implementations:

"it's OK to distribute along with GCJ, GNU/Classpath and so on - that was one of the explicit intents of the new license as that was previously the chief obstacle to distribution with GNU/Linux.

That clause of DLJ simply means you can't take the Sun package apart and use elements of it to complete or modify another package - so, for example, it would be a breach of the license to take the Swing classes from the Sun JDK and add them to GNU/Classpath. Just shipping the two systems alongside each other is explicitly OK."

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"clarifications" on the side are worthless; the license is unusable

Posted May 18, 2006 16:31 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

That's nice, but if that was their intent they should have said so in the license, rather than leaving it vague and open to later reinterpretation.

The goal of a license should be to give users and developers confidence and clear knowledge of what they can and cannot do. As it stands, the text of the license is so broad and vague in forbidding software with the "same or similar functionality or APIs" from running "in conjunction with" Sun's code, that it seems basically unusable.

I mean, "similar functionality?" That could include everything from Tcl/Tk to Mono. (Notice that it says "functionality or APIs" so it's not limited to things like classpath.)

Java becomes more distributable

Posted May 18, 2006 18:01 UTC (Thu) by piman (guest, #8957) [Link]

If you're forced to build a wall between "real Java" and "free Java" when you distribute them, it's not much use. You'd have to ship two copies of every free Java library, you wouldn't be able to name both of them "/usr/bin/java" via an alternatives system, etc. So even if you can come up with a way to distribute them together, the license forces you to cripple one of them.