[arch-dev-public] java licensing issues

[Jan de Groot]

On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 11:52 -0700, Jason Chu wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 08:15:19PM +0200, Jan de Groot wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I thought that we were following the dlj guidelines... did you mention
> anything to them about that?
> 
> https://jdk-distros.dev.java.net/
> 
> Any other approach we made, we'd have to make sure that all our currently
> supported java apps still work.  I only know about the couple that I
> maintain...

Looks promising, but it still leaves us with an outdated jdk/jre full of
bugs which are fixed already in the commercial version. Also, I wouldn't
know how to run sun's JDK on archppc for example, something which is
possible with the GNU java framework we have.

About broken projects: we will test which ones will work tomorrow. At
least the Sun compiler suite is broken with it because they do hardcoded
version checks, but that one is broken anyways because glibc contains C
++ code in the C headers which works fine in gcc but breaks in the sun
compiler ;). This gcc-gcj release looks very solid to me, there
shouldn't be any problem running eclipse with it for example (hey, gcj
is compiled by eclipse ;)).