Re: jdk 1.3

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 03:02:45PM +0200, Kalle Hasselström wrote:
| On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 12:21:35PM +0200, Olivier Bourgeois wrote:
| > Le Fri, 10 Aug 2001 12:12:25 +0200
| > Kalle Hasselström <kalle@treskal.com> a ecrit :
| > 
| > > What packages supply jdk 1.3? Are there any packages at all of sun's
| > > jdk, or is it not free enough?
| > > 
| > 
| > Hi,
| > 
| > personally I'm using blackdown jdk version 1.3.1 . It is supplied as a
| > debian package. I added this to my sources.list :
| > 
| > deb ftp://ftp.oleane.net/pub/java-linux/debian potato non-free
| > 
| > You should take a look at the mirrors list :
| > 
| > http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux/mirrors.html
| 
| Thanks, it works great! Though with no local mirror, the download was
| kinda slow. :-(
| 
| Who exactly are blackdown? Are they making their own jvm and stuff, or
| do they tweak sun's code or what? (And in that case, why?)

I don't know if it is still true, but in the early days (of java) Sun
only cared enough to make Solaris and Windows binary JVMs.  The
Blackdown group signed NDAs with Sun in order to port Sun's JVM to
linux.  That is why they only release binary packages -- they aren't
allowed (by sun) to release any info about the source.  There are some
groups working independently to create free JVMs -- the gcc people and
the Kaffe people.

-D