Sun JRE or JDK to enter core, or at least extras?

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Dariusz J. Garbowski <thuforuk at yahoo.co.uk> said:
> On 05/17/2006 11:28 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
> >Given all the other issues, I don't think it really matters.  The
> >conflict with GCJ and such is a much bigger issue; I don't see Fedora
> >dropping GCJ or the alternatives system that allows either GCJ or the
> >Sun JDK for development.
> 
> According to this note by Simon Phipps that's not true:
> 
> http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=jdk_on_gnu_linux_something#comment3
> 
> Quotation from the comment:
> 
> "No, 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."

Section 2 of the license says in part (including a couple of problem
parts):

   Sun also grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free
   limited license to reproduce and distribute the Software, directly or
   indirectly through your licensees, distributors, resellers, or OEMs,
   electronically or in physical form or pre-installed with your
   Operating System on a general purpose desktop computer or server,
   provided that:

   (b) the Software is distributed with your Operating System, and such
       distribution is solely for the purposes of running Programs under
       the control of your Operating System and designing, developing
       and testing Programs to be run under the control of your
       Operating System;

   (c) you do not combine, configure or distribute the Software to run
       in conjunction with any additional software that implements the
       same or similar functionality or APIs as the Software;

Section 2(b) says Sun's JDK (as released under this license) can only be
used with Fedora to develop programs to run under Fedora.  At best, the
meaning can be extended to be used with Linux to develop programs to run
under Linux.  What happened to "run anywhere"?  Even if they included
the source under an otherwise Open Source license, that clause means it
isn't very useful for Java development.

Section 2(c) says it cannot be combined or distributed with other
software of "same or similar functionality or APIs".  There are no
definitions, so that would tend to indicate it can't be distributed with
any other Java implementation or any other software development tools of
"similar functionality" (Mono/C#? Perl? Python?).  IIRC (I'm not a Java
developer) there is a Java to native code interface; you could not use
the Sun JDK with a native library that implements similar functionality
to a class in the JDK either.

IANAL, but if that's not what Sun meant, they need to work on their
license some more.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.