This means that the Sun JDK can now move out of the multiverse ghetto in Ubuntu. And will ship with Feisty Fawn. Meanwhile, Debian will find some excuse to rebrand it IcedTea or some other childish nonsense.
Apache Harmony (which contrary to published reports exited incubation last month [our bad, as we haven’t updated the website yet - Ed.]) will continue to thrive, and will attract the attention of those contributors who are not interested in assigning joint ownership of their copyrights over to Sun. Had Sun instead chosen some public organization like the FSF, I’d be even more impressed, but ultimately, it is their IP to do with as they please. They have a every right to create a heliocentric organization around their codebase. I’d also have been more impressed if the Classpath Exception also applied to J2ME.
Parts of Classpath will merge; the rest will atrophy, as the epic battle has been won.
But mostly when everything settles down, the world won’t look all that much different. Except that some of those that who didn’t even realize that they had a hankering for Iced Tea will have found another perfect Pepsi.
This may not be an appropriate forum for discussing Apache license policy, but I seem to remember that Apache decided a couple years ago that GPL was not compatible with Apache licensing. Is the Classpath exception sufficient for Apache’s concerns? Or is my memory entirely faulty?
As to the impact of a GPL’ed implementation of Java (with or without a Classpath exception) to existing ASF projects, I’ll quote Roy Fielding:
We can use their binaries. We cannot introduce features that depend only on their binaries (or their source code, for that matter). Doing so restricts the distribution of our entire product to LGPL or GPL, which is why it is forbidden within the ASF.
If the developer dual-licenses the code in a form that is non-viral, such as the Apache or MPL 1.1 licenses, then we can depend on it.
Apache is a trademark of the Apache Foundation, yet Debian has not been forced to rename it. There are a number of others (OpenOffice.org, Eclipse, Perl, Python, MySQL, Subversion, SpamAssassin, ImageMagick, etc.) — all trademarked, all included in Debian main, all with their original trademarked names. The only ones that seem to require renaming are Mozilla products. Ask yourself why.
Meanwhile, Debian will find some excuse to rebrand it IcedTea or some other childish nonsense.
That seems a bit unfair to Debian — it was the Mozilla project who complained that Debian couldn’t ship their Firefox as Firefox because it was patched. The trademark rules that Sun have for Java look more sane, in that you can call it Java provided it passes the test suite (which is the same approach that TeX takes).
it was the Mozilla project who complained that Debian couldn’t ship their Firefox as Firefox because it was patched
Close. It was the Mozilla project who complained that Debian couldn’t ship their Firefox as Firefox because it was patched to use open source artwork instead of the “official” artwork (which is under a strict copyright).
So there’s more information about the Java ™ announcement and I’m going to assume the best. Before I go any further, let me again acknowledge that it’s a big step and I have strong hopes that the things that are not perfect...
Congratulations to the Sun guys for the open sourcing of Java, another great contribution of Sun to free software. I blogged about this in the past, but it is worth linking to it again, as I raised what I think are some interesting points regarding...
And Sun Said, Set My Java Free: The Open Source Q&A
In his essay “Free But Shackled - The Java Trap,” free software advocate, developer and leader Richard Stallman said the following:If you develop a Java program on Sun’s Java platform, you are liable to use Sun-only features without even noticing.......
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And Sun Said, Set My Java Free: The Open Source Q&A
In his essay “Free But Shackled - The Java Trap,” free software advocate, developer and leader Richard Stallman said the following:If you develop a Java program on Sun’s Java platform, you are liable to use Sun-only features without even noticing....
This means that the Sun JDK can now move out of the multiverse ghetto in Ubuntu. And will ship with Feisty Fawn. Meanwhile, Debian will find some excuse to rebrand it IcedTea or some other childish nonsense....
So, this morning I awake to the news that Java will be GPL2′d. Cool. About time. I’m not convinced that this will make a huge difference unless it helps to drive more aggressive innovation in the platform. I also see in my feed reader a post from...
After years of promises and speculation, Sun finally made Java open source. All I can say is that it’s much too late. Sun has made some poor design and engineering decisions over the past few years which will continue to bite Java developers...
Duke Open Sourced: now that is news. And a word to the wise (IBM)
Sam Ruby: Open Source Duke Sun drives some fun into the whole OSS equation. GPL/Apache - who cares? Duke is now an open source icon. literally. Its good to see Sam say something positive about Sun’s contributions this week. His......
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This means that the Sun JDK can now move out of the multiverse ghetto in Ubuntu. And will ship with Feisty Fawn. Meanwhile, Debian will find some excuse to rebrand it IcedTea or some other childish nonsense. — Sam Ruby...