Yann Dirson wrote:
Hi Debian-Java team, Following the recent OpenJDK announcement, I suppose that many Debian users, but also DD's with packages that still require Sun JDK to build/work, can't wait to see it packaged :) The only information I could find about openjdk is the Nov'06 ITP's for the early parts - nothing in various list archives or in svn. Has anyone started to work on this ? Is any help needed ? Best regards,
I suspect one thing that could hold Debian back is that the OpenJDK still has encumbered bits. It would be difficult to distribute a binary because the binary incorporates some non-free stuff from the encumbered bits. I don't know what license we put on redistributing the encumbered bits, but it clearly can't be a free license, so redistributing a binary build at the moment clearly would not pass muster with debian-legal.
What Gentoo is delivering appears to me to be a build script where the end user is the one downloading both the sources and the encumbered bits. Also Tom Fitzsimmons (Fedora) has set up a source RPM that I think he intends to incorporate into Fedora.
In the long term we clearly want to get to a position where openjdk builds can be incorporated into the free repository of Debian and other distros. But we aren't there, yet.
http://openjdk.java.net http://openjdk.java.net/legal/ http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.jsp#h - David Herron