On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 17:14 -0500, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> [Is Sun's Java 1.6] Free (as Libre) Software?
No.
(It is at least now redistributable, which allowed the likes of
Debian to ship it in non-free. Progress)
You may, however, be interested to hear that a new project has kicked
off to take Open JDK 1.7 and back port it to be an Open Java that
matches what Sun's proprietary Java + class library presented at the 1.6
version level. http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/forward_to_the_past and
as linked from
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk6-dev/2008-February/000001.html
There is pretty wide interest in it, and I'd crystal ball that Open JDK
1.6 will almost certainly be available a hell of a lot sooner than Java
1.7 [which is, by all accounts, intended to be a long way off].
So in the not to distant future there were be a GPL free Java 1.6.
That's awesome.
You can, incidentally, use the likes of {JamVM, CACAO, ...} + GNU
Classpath to get a very good Free Java. And, people are working to
backport stuff from Open JDK to Classpath, so it's improving too.
All in all, the convergence is good. It remains to be seen whether
there's a happy ending to all this; by all accounts Sun is continuing to
be overwhelmed with the implications of doing things in a globally
distributed community free-software context. The best part is that the
Free Java people are continuing to try and constructively engage with
the people who, until a year ago, had been writing proprietary software
for the proceeding 15 years. Again, progress.
AfC
London
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