Tuesday May 16, 2006 links for 2006-05-17
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I'm quoted commenting on the new DLJ and the associated Debian packages, which all ow distribution of the Sun JDK in Debian non-free for the first time.
JDK on GNU/Linux: Something Wonderful
Something wonderful just happened. If you have ever tried to install the Java platform on GNU/Linux, you'll know it's been really hard work. For reasons that date back to the 90s, and which were never meant to cause GNU/Linux a problem (as at the time it wasn't really on the radar), the Java platform has been licensed in such a way that GNU/Linux distributions couldn't carry it. In addition, the Sun-provided installer for GNU/Linux has, to be charitable, sucked.
All that just ended. An unprecedented collection of Debian developers, Ubuntu developers, Sun engineers and Sun lawyers has spent months devising a new binary license for the Java platform, together with the parts for new installers, so that the Java platform is available on GNU/Linux in a way that "just works". Yes, you can now apt-get install sun-java5-jre and have it install without fuss on Debian and Ubuntu. Gentoo will have it soon too.
This is not just for those distros. Novell has endorsed the new license, NexentaOS, Belenix and Schillix are all using it and all other GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris distros are welcome - e-mail me if you have a distro and need help. If you are at JavaOne, come to our special unBOF on packaging the JDK for GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris, upstairs at the Thirsty Bear at 5:30pm on Tuesday (yes, today).
The mechanism is the new "Distro License for Java", DLJ, and a new jdk-distros community. The DLJ does away with the cascaded liability terms, the greater-weight Java product requirement and the no other implementations requirement for distributing the JDK. The jdk-distros community provides a place for all GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris distributions to get the parts they need to build install packages tuned for their system. The combination ends a nightmare that Java developers on GNU/Linux have faced for years, and ushers in a new wave of Java development on GNU/Linux and on OpenSolaris.
As you can tell, I'm really pumped about this! I got to announce it at DebConf in Mexico on Monday, and it's in the keynote today at JavaOne in San Francisco (I've flown up specially). Consider it a downpayment on the future of the Java platform!
