On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 9:15 PM, Edward Capriolo <edlinuxg...@gmail.com> wrote: > "I don't really have any opinions on Oracle per say, but Cassandra is a > Free Software project and I would prefer that we not depend on > commercial software, (and that's kind of what we have here, an > implicit dependency)." > > We are a bit loose here with terms "free" and "commercial". The oracle JVM > is open source, it is free to use and the trademark is owned by a company.
Are we? There are many definitions for the word "free", only one of which means "without cost"; I assumed it was obvious that I was talking about licensing terms (and of course the implications of that licensing). Cassandra is Free Software by virtue of the fact that it is Apache Licensed. You are Free (as in Freedom) to modify and redistribute it. The Oracle JVM ships with a commercial license. It is free only in the sense that you are not required to pay anything to use it, (i.e. you are not Free to do much of anything other than use it to run Java software). > That is not much different then using a tool for cassandra like a driver > hosted on github but made my a company. It is very different IME. Cassandra requires a JVM to function, this is a hard dependency. A driver is merely a means to make use of it. > The thing about a JVM is that like a kernel you want really smart dedicated > people working on it. Oracle has moved the JVM forward since taking over > sun. You can not just manage a JVM like say the freebsd port of x maintained > by 3 part time dudes that all get paid to do something else. I don't how to read any of this. It sounds like you're saying that a JVM is something that cannot be produced as a Free Software project, or maybe that you just really like Oracle, I'm honestly not sure. It doesn't seem relevant though, because there is in fact a Free Software JVM (and in addition to some mere mortals, the fine people at Oracle do contribute to it). -- Eric Evans john.eric.ev...@gmail.com
