OpenOffice.org and Java in Fedora

Paul Nasrat pauln at truemesh.com
Wed Nov 19 09:52:39 UTC 2003


On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 10:27:40AM +0100, Roland Käser wrote:

First off please don't post in html.

> Sorry that I now reactivating the Java discussion again, but I think Java is
> one of the most important technolgies for the business environment specially as
> a antipole against the whole .NET hype.  

Yest but the license agreements are non-trivial - trust me.  Different
components vary and if you aren't shipping an app or are making changes (eg
fixing up stuff to detect nptl, fixing paths) you are most likely in breach of
them.

> Is it not better to talk with sun

People have tried, as a community project it's quite hard.  Some have been
successfull but only with a limited scope - eg jboss distributing the j2ee
apis, the license is non-transferable:

" The licensee (JBoss Group) is granted
 the permission to distribute the Sun stuff for the sole purpose of
 running the application.  And the license is non-transferable."

Which means say if you write a junitee test or a mock object using j2ee apis
then you could technically be in breach of the license.

I suggest you dig through jpackage archives and debian-legal for more
information about the intresting combinations of licensing there was a summary
post on the various non-free components and the versions of the licenses but I
don't have that to hand.

> about a version to ship with fedora. It would also allow to ship tomcat and so
> many of java based web applications for the business field.

If you want to use tomcat on fedora (in a package managed fashion), you have a
few choices:

1) use naoko - the natively compiled tomcat which will ship in FC2 if all goes
well I believe.

2) Use JPackage and rebuild the non-free components your self - from the FAQ:

What is with the non-free section?

The non-free section contains some vital/interesting applications that can not
be redistributed as binaries due to licensing restrictions. The JPackage
Project has made every reasonable effort to contact the various vendors and see
if an agreement could be made to distribute binaries, but at least for now, the
no source RPMs (.nosrc.rpm) has been determined to be the only legal method
available.

There's something YOU can do about this: go vote for bug id 4680244 at
Sun's bug parade. 

We don't want to stop you using java, just we'd rather not breach the license
agreements, of course if you want to redistribute the JDK in a sane manner in
breach of the sun license there is nothing stopping you from setting up a
repository rebuilt from the JPackage nosrc.rpms, indeed for internal use in a
company this is probably fine, but a public repositiory is not going to happen
unless the licensing improves.  It is not practical for a distribution to
repackage stuff without patching or changing paths for FHS compatibility. 

Paul





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