Heya, Michael Meskes <meskes@debian.org> writes: [Java flamewar] > DPL, I wonder Why the Sun-Java package is not handled the same as any > other package. What makes it so special that it deserves special > treatment? > > Isn't this a discrimination against all other packages? :-) ACK. This is the most important problem with the Java license for me - in general, the ftp-masters are *very* strict when it comes to licenses. Even if upstream provides some FAQ or something to clarify badly worded parts of the license, they are usually required to change the license of their software to get it into Debian. I understand that a lot of people are interested to get Sun Java packaged for Debian (and it would be a real improvement if we were able to distribute it!), but I can not understand why it is special-cased when it comes to licensing issues. If Sun is interested in getting Java included in the major Linux distributions, it shouldn't be such a big problem to provide a license draft, hear opinions and then *change* it. In his mail, aj said "both James and Jeroen had extensive contact with Sun to ensure that the tricky clauses were actually okay" - that's nice. If the license wasn't public at that point, it shouldn't have been too hard to change the problematic clauses of the license to say what they mean. As far as I understand the whole thing, Sun simply provided their license, but was not willing to address the concerns that were expressed in the license itself. It simply doesn't look like this was a fair process with the aim of getting to a solution that satisfies both parties. Which is not really helping to ensure that Sun will not try to do bad stuff at some time in the future. So at the moment, we have a license with some ambiguous clauses, a lot of unhappy DDs and Java on those mirrors that provide non-free. I don't think that removing the packages again is the right signal to send out, but I think that we should work these problems out before etch is released. OK, now to the reason for CCing aj: Could you please delegate someone to do a status report, talk to Sun and then report back to project? I can understand that for a big corporation like Sun, it's not easy to work together with a many-headed hydra like debian(-legal), so this could help to get to a solution in a reasonable time-frame. To calm everyone down, it would probably good to choose someone for this who was *not* involved in this cute little flamewar we're all enjoying so much. Ignoring the concerns of the developers who are frustrated by the whole thing will not help anyone, but those people should please remember that we're trying to create the best Linux distribution *together*. Flaming is usually not the best way to present one's arguments. Thanks, Marc (hating legal stuff and flamewars in general) -- BOFH #431: Borg implants are failing
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