Re: apt and java
Omry Yadan <omry_y <at> inter.net.il> writes:
> A question comes into my mind:
> Was the discussion focused on how to get make java and Debian closer, or
> on how to avoid the horrendous sun licensing?
Making Java and Debian closer is simple: use free runtimes, report bugs &
help us make them better than Sun's Java implementation is all respects that
you care about.
Avoiding Sun's licensing is simple: just don't use works covered under it.
Working around Sun's licensing is pointless: if the copyright holder has
weird
ideas about licensing, you'd better not try to provoke them to unleash the
army
of lawyers on you. In particular when that army of lawyers extracted USD
2*10**9
from Microsoft. You're much better off avoiding the weird legal mess that
Sun's
JRE/JDK/SCSL license is, unless you have
a) lots of cash to burn potentially in court,
b) good lawyers at your disposal that can make sense out of the licensing
mess,
c) cash to burn on a commercial Java redistribution license,
d) a business that can bring back the money you lose on licensing the
thing,
e) people willing to risk their financial existance for distributing
non-free code
As you can imagine, all 5 are not very likely for debian for a lot of
good
reasons ;) If you don't like Sun's license, don't use their code. If you
don't
like the free software alternatives, put some effort into making them suit
your
needs.
> I mean, there might be a way to achieve both:
>
> Maybe its possible to create a standard stub for sun's jvm?
> say, we add a standard JVM slot, and have java programs depends on the
> existence of a JVM.
> than, we create a deb for each free JVM (kaffe and friends?), and a
> standard stub for sun's jvm.
> if a user wants to install a java application through apt-get and he has
> no JVM deb installed, apt will give him a choice (can apt ask user how
> to resolve dependency conflict, or is it always automatic?) as to which
> JVM he wants to use.
Going out of one's way to support software that one can not legally support
is
as b0rked as suggesting that Debian should support MS .net runtime through
Wine
as the default C# environment instead of Mono/pnet. Sun does not support
Java on
Debian. The JDK is *not certified* on Debian, ie. it is *not* guaranteed
to be
compatible with the JDK on, say, Windows or anything else. Sun does not
care
about Debian, they care about Red Hat & SUSE, Solaris & Windows,
according to
their download page, as that's what they certify.
Check out last year's archives from September/October for a detailed
discussion
of similar proposals between Jan Schulz and others and why they are
broken.
> I will have a look, sounds interesting.
> but it does not help java portability.
Of course it does. Without gcj you couldn't run Java code on a few
dozens of
platforms. Sun's 'anywhere' barely covers a handful of platforms.
Kaffe, for
example, has been ported to more than 70 platforms, including
playstation2,
arm-riscos or linux-sh, for example. Kaffe has been actively
helping the
portability of java code since 1996.
> I know everyone here are open source advocates, but face it:
> 1. good programs sometimes comes without the source.
If they prove to be good enough, then someone comes up and writes
better
programs as free software. Happened with Unix. Happened with C.
Happened with
C++. Happens with Java right now. You too can be a part of it, you
don't have to
put yourself in a position where you depend on Sun and their
choice of licensing.
> 2. not all users are interesting in compiling the programs they run, it
> scares the shit out of some users.
As long as it happens as part of your normal apt-get routine, as
it happens
with, say, emacs lisp programs, I don't see why it could be a
problem. Does
apt-getting emacs scare the shit out of you? ;)
> Java is portable, JVM's are not.
Well-written VMs are portable, and are getting ported widely. For a nicely
portable VM,
I'd suggest checking out SableVM, Kaffe, JamVM, or even JikesRVM,
which is
written almost entirely in Java, and has a great scientific community
behind it.
cheers,
dalibor topic
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