Omry Yadan <omry_y <at> inter.net.il> writes: > A question comes into my mind: > Was the discussion focused on how to get make java and Debian closer, or > on how to avoid the horrendous sun licensing?
Making Java and Debian closer is simple: use free runtimes, report bugs & help us make them better than Sun's Java implementation is all respects that you care about. Avoiding Sun's licensing is simple: just don't use works covered under it. Working around Sun's licensing is pointless: if the copyright holder has weird ideas about licensing, you'd better not try to provoke them to unleash the army of lawyers on you. In particular when that army of lawyers extracted USD 2*10**9 from Microsoft. You're much better off avoiding the weird legal mess that Sun's JRE/JDK/SCSL license is, unless you have a) lots of cash to burn potentially in court, b) good lawyers at your disposal that can make sense out of the licensing mess, c) cash to burn on a commercial Java redistribution license, d) a business that can bring back the money you lose on licensing the thing, e) people willing to risk their financial existance for distributing non-free code As you can imagine, all 5 are not very likely for debian for a lot of good reasons ;) If you don't like Sun's license, don't use their code. If you don't like the free software alternatives, put some effort into making them suit your needs. > I mean, there might be a way to achieve both: > > Maybe its possible to create a standard stub for sun's jvm? > say, we add a standard JVM slot, and have java programs depends on the > existence of a JVM. > than, we create a deb for each free JVM (kaffe and friends?), and a > standard stub for sun's jvm. > if a user wants to install a java application through apt-get and he has > no JVM deb installed, apt will give him a choice (can apt ask user how > to resolve dependency conflict, or is it always automatic?) as to which > JVM he wants to use. Going out of one's way to support software that one can not legally support is as b0rked as suggesting that Debian should support MS .net runtime through Wine as the default C# environment instead of Mono/pnet. Sun does not support Java on Debian. The JDK is *not certified* on Debian, ie. it is *not* guaranteed to be compatible with the JDK on, say, Windows or anything else. Sun does not care about Debian, they care about Red Hat & SUSE, Solaris & Windows, according to their download page, as that's what they certify. Check out last year's archives from September/October for a detailed discussion of similar proposals between Jan Schulz and others and why they are broken. > I will have a look, sounds interesting. > but it does not help java portability. Of course it does. Without gcj you couldn't run Java code on a few dozens of platforms. Sun's 'anywhere' barely covers a handful of platforms. Kaffe, for example, has been ported to more than 70 platforms, including playstation2, arm-riscos or linux-sh, for example. Kaffe has been actively helping the portability of java code since 1996. > I know everyone here are open source advocates, but face it: > 1. good programs sometimes comes without the source. If they prove to be good enough, then someone comes up and writes better programs as free software. Happened with Unix. Happened with C. Happened with C++. Happens with Java right now. You too can be a part of it, you don't have to put yourself in a position where you depend on Sun and their choice of licensing. > 2. not all users are interesting in compiling the programs they run, it > scares the shit out of some users. As long as it happens as part of your normal apt-get routine, as it happens with, say, emacs lisp programs, I don't see why it could be a problem. Does apt-getting emacs scare the shit out of you? ;) > Java is portable, JVM's are not. Well-written VMs are portable, and are getting ported widely. For a nicely portable VM, I'd suggest checking out SableVM, Kaffe, JamVM, or even JikesRVM, which is written almost entirely in Java, and has a great scientific community behind it. cheers, dalibor topic
