Hi. Arnaud Vandyck wrote:
Omry Yadan <omry_y@inter.net.il> wrote:I have emailed sun today, quering if they approve an automatic installer which will get the bin from their site, and execute it - showing the user the license as it does that, and installing if the user approved. I described to them that the user can choose to install jdk/jre alone, or it might be triggered when he wishes to install a java application. lets see what they say.
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You know, I am not sure sure writing a program which downloads the bin From their site and installing it can be categorized as distributing it. its them who distribute it, and its them who are paying for the bandwidth and storage.They'll have to provide a hard link without authentication.
Well, that was the first problem I thought about, when I read that proposal. It's not like Sun requires real authentication to download Java. But the download process consists of multiple pages, and you need to accept a licence agreement. Also the pages seem to be part of some https-session, and the URLs are dynamic and not too human-readable.
Nevertheless I think it is technically possible to write a program which gets the JDKs from Sun's download-website. Also the licence the user has to accept before downloading seems to be the same as the one contained in the respective JDKs, which again seems to be the same as shown when using java-package.
However, the whole download and licence stuff indicates, that Sun probably does not like us doing stuff like that. So I'm curious what kind of answer Omry will get from Sun, if any.
Also, when every packages have been loaded, some Debian users stop their connection and will not be happy if a package ask them to download another package during the installation...
I know at least one package (quake2-data) which does download some stuff during configuration. However the user can choose, whether to use a manually downloaded file instead or skip the installation of 3rd party stuff. In the latter case he/she can do the download later, by reconfiguring the package.
In my opinion, this would be an accaptable approach for Sun's JDKs. Of course legal and technical issues would have to be solved first.
Regards, Michael