Re: General Resolution: Removing non-freeeral Resolution: Removing non-free
tb@mit.edu (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:
> Gilbert Laycock <gtl1@mcs.le.ac.uk> writes:
>
> > See the archives of the debian-java mailing list for details (which it
> > is entirely possible that I have mis-remembered).
>
> Rather than a pointer to a long complex discussion, is there a
> distillation of the resulting reasons why a Java 2 implementation
> cannot be free?
I was hoping that somebody who had actually participated in these
discussions might speak up, but no sign yet...
At the moment, I cannot find a place that summarises all the different
problems with Java 2 licensing in a single document. (Unless you count
the SCSL itself.)
The following is my own attempt to summarise the situation.
The Sun Community Source License (SCSL) under which jdk1.2, and (I
think) the Java 2 specification, are released state that an attempt to
produce your own implementation of the specification is a "derived
work" and therefore also covered by the SCSL.
The SCSL does not allow use for commercial purposes (you have to get
(ie pay for) a separate license agreement with sun for that).
Together these seem to prohibit there ever being a DFSG compliant Java
2 implementation.
I think that the license also forbids distributing the jdk1.2 tar
archive by ftp (or CD) without permission. So we cannot put jdk1.2 in
non-free - an installer package is the most we can hope for.
--
Gilbert Laycock email: gtl1@mcs.le.ac.uk
Maths and Computer Science, http://www.mcs.le.ac.uk/~glaycock
University of Leicester phone: (+44) 116 252 3902
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