On 6/1/07, Jan de Groot
Hi developers and users,
As we all know, there's a distribution restriction on sun java. Today we asked at the Sun booth about possibilities for distributing java with our distribution. This solution would come down to entering a process which can take quite some months to get a final approvement. This means that until we would have such a solution, any Sun java we distribute is illegal.
This would mean that jdk and jre can't have a place in our distribution at least for the upcoming few months if we choose to apply for a license. If we don't choose to apply for a license, it won't come back either. I would opt for not applying for a license, as it will license us to distribute it, but disallows all forks, livecds or even unofficial architectures of archlinux to do it.
As we have GNU java right now supporting java 5.0, I would suggest approving GNU java as the prefered JDK and moving jdk/jre to unsupported. We are allowed to distribute build scripts, but users have to download the java binary themselves and build a package out of that. We leave it up to the user to have a non-free java, we won't force anything (java-environment and java-runtime will always stay runtime dependencies instead of depending on java-gcj-compat).
I like this idea in theory.... but we'll have to try and make it as clear as possible what's happening. But yeah, when licensing rigmarole like this happens, might as well say "screw you then" and use a better alternative.