NetBeans ITP [was Re: CDDL]

[Tom Marble <Tom.Marble@Sun.COM>]

Marco d'Itri wrote:
> jmarant@free.fr wrote:
> 
>> I watched Sun's Simon Phipps' talk at debconf 2006 few weeks ago.
>> It was mentioned that the choice of venue was useless and would be
>> removed from CDDL, thus making CDDL DSFG-compliant.
> There is no consensus that choice of venue clauses are not
> DSFG-compliant, anyway.

Indeed allow me to appeal to everyone to reconsider CDDL *as is*
given the clarification that Simon has provided in this regard [1].

Why is this important?  Because Sun has several software projects
that are licensed under CDDL that we would really, really like
accepted into Debian.  The key example is our NetBeans IDE.
The purpose of packaging NetBeans for Debian is to give Free
Software developers *a chance* to evaluate this development tool
and compare it to other tools available.

Until very, very recently this hasn't even been possible as
we are fully aware that NetBeans has had various "non-free"
dependencies (which would have blocked it's inclusion in "main").
Thus the primary rationale for liberating javac and JavaHelp
as part of the Java Open Source launch [2] was to free these
key dependencies for NetBeans.  Today NetBeans also depends
on the Sun Java runtime.  We have done some research with
Free Java implementations to demonstrate functionality
on a runtime currently in "main" and this work is ongoing.

So you can transparently see the trajectory of Sun Java
becoming itself a Free Java runtime in early 2007 [2].
In the interim I am very pleased in our work together to
date to get Sun Java into "non-free" under the DLJ [3].
And so the trajectory for NetBeans, therefore, is we would
like to package all dependent parts which are recognized
as DFSG compliant for "main" (CDDL, GPL packages) and
prepare a NetBeans package under CDDL which depends (initially)
on the "non-free" Sun Java runtime [3] such that upon the
full liberation of Sun Java that NetBeans will become
a candidate for "main".

I know that CDDL has been discussed many, many times on
d-l in the past.  In light of Sun's commitment to Free Software
and our desire to make this software available to Debian
Developers and users it is apropos to work towards consensus
on the DFSG status of CDDL.  I welcome your comments
and concerns.

Respectfully,

--Tom

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/choice_of_venue
[2] http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sun-java5.html