Ubuntu announced today that they will remove Java from their repositories. It appears that Oracle wants to reorganize the way Java is distributed, and withdrew a Partner License that tied them with Canonical. Or some legal mumbo jumbo like that.
That raises some questions:
1- Wait, can they do that?
According to the Wikipedia article on Java, the code is has been licensed by Sun under the GPL. It seems to me that doing such would give the code some protection like the obligation to distribute the source. What is the legal situation exactly?
EDIT: Java is not open source, but Oracle made a big effort to define the Reference Implementation on available open source code. It may not open source Java7, but it's the next best thing :) /source (read also comment #13)
2- So what's the solution now?
Everything is taken away. The JDK and the JRE. This is drawing a lot of attention to OpenJDK, an alternate implementation. There are serious talks about moving to the free alternatives, and the community is assessing the stability and compatibility issues. I like the idea of having multiple implementations. Project like PyPy or Mono are simply amazing. Is anyone here thinking of shifting to openJDK?
Disclaimer: If you're new to Java programming, or if you wonder what the hell is oracle-jdk vs open-jdk vs sun-jdk, you should use the "standard/official" Java, Oracle-JDK(tm).
3- What's with the .deb?
They only present their package as .rpm and .tar.gz. Why can't they present a .deb? It's proving annoying to install on Debian systems (like Ubuntu). They already provide debs for Virtualbox, can't they do the same here?
That raises some questions:
1- Wait, can they do that?
According to the Wikipedia article on Java, the code is has been licensed by Sun under the GPL. It seems to me that doing such would give the code some protection like the obligation to distribute the source. What is the legal situation exactly?
EDIT: Java is not open source, but Oracle made a big effort to define the Reference Implementation on available open source code. It may not open source Java7, but it's the next best thing :) /source (read also comment #13)
2- So what's the solution now?
Everything is taken away. The JDK and the JRE. This is drawing a lot of attention to OpenJDK, an alternate implementation. There are serious talks about moving to the free alternatives, and the community is assessing the stability and compatibility issues. I like the idea of having multiple implementations. Project like PyPy or Mono are simply amazing. Is anyone here thinking of shifting to openJDK?
Disclaimer: If you're new to Java programming, or if you wonder what the hell is oracle-jdk vs open-jdk vs sun-jdk, you should use the "standard/official" Java, Oracle-JDK(tm).
3- What's with the .deb?
They only present their package as .rpm and .tar.gz. Why can't they present a .deb? It's proving annoying to install on Debian systems (like Ubuntu). They already provide debs for Virtualbox, can't they do the same here?
