> These installers and packages are provided by various NetBeans *committers* > as a convenience
Ah, yes--I had forgotten about that part! So, yes, the community installers are in fact built by the same developers as NetBeans itself. It's just that we can't use the official "Apache" stamp on binaries that include OpenJDK. -- Eirik From: Neil C Smith <neilcsm...@apache.org> Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2025 at 12:30 PM To: Eirik Bakke <eba...@ultorg.com> Cc: NetBeans Mailing List <users@netbeans.apache.org>, "josh.ba...@taylor.com" <josh.ba...@taylor.com> Subject: Re: No Windows Installation Version. On Tue, 17 Jun 2025 at 16:48, Eirik Bakke <eba...@ultorg.com.inva<mailto:eba...@ultorg.com.inva>lid> wrote: It's a bit confusing, but the Apache NetBeans project now produces a single ZIP file distribution that is official and voted on, and then encourages other organizations to develop "community installers" that provide a more streamlined installation experience. The community installers can include all the various dependencies, which aren't always possible to bundle with official Apache binaries, for GPLv2 dependencies in particular. In particular, the community installers can bundle the Java platform (OpenJDK), which is needed to run NetBeans. You can safely use the community installer! Thanks Eirik. Can I just clarify something about "other organizations" in there. We do obviously encourage other people, Linux distros, Flatpak, etc. to distribute Apache NetBeans. At the same time, the wording on the download pages for "community installers" has always had a specific meaning (emphasis added) - "These installers and packages are provided by various NetBeans *committers* as a convenience." One reason for moving the existing community installers from my company to the new foundation is to ease opening up access to any other committers. Committers are always welcome to distribute packages and installers with different requirements too. But I hope we keep the restriction that community installers specifically refers to installers provided by our community, our committers, that for one reason or another (eg. Java runtime) cannot be provided directly via Apache. On the question of safety, another point I made on a question about the macOS installers, was that the community and ASF installers were built and signed on the same box by the same person for the last few years! Best wishes, Neil
