Will Webstart be integrated in OpenJDK?

[Andrew John Hughes]

2008/9/11 Mario Torre <neugens at limasoftware.net>:
> Il giorno mer, 10/09/2008 alle 23.27 +0100, Andrew John Hughes ha
> scritto:
>
>> was seeing this used as a tool for patch approval during the
>> AWT/Swing/Java2D discussion Mario
>> mentions.  A Free project being dependent on a proprietary test suite
>
> You are completely right of course, and I totally support Mark reply to
> that same post.
>
> I want to add one thing though. The requirement for our code to pass the
> JCK is because they want (oh, let's say we want) to include it into the
> mainline, that is, Java(TM), not "just" OpenJDK. There is a big
> difference in the two things, despite the code is in fact the same
> (minus really minor things of course).
>
> I'm not saying that this is ok, because I still find it odd, but I can
> understand it. Despite this, I will not run the JCK without asking first
> legal advice (its click through is really scaring!), but I don't care if
> others do.
>
> Finally, including the code into mailing is much more important to me
> than fixing the issue with who has to run the JCK (again, I'm not saying
> this is not an important issue that has to be fixed), because we are
> external developers (well... ehm... at least so far... :) and this is
> really a big change that can have much more impact on the way things
> will work in the future, so let's do things one at a time.
>
> Cheers,
> Mario, who really wants to go to sleep now, as it was a long day...
>
>
>

I agree pretty much with what you say, and, as I think you picked up on,
my issue is not so much that the code has to pass the JCK tests, but who is
responsible for running these and fixing any issues.  If Sun want it to remain
proprietary, then they should also be willing to take on the responsibility of
running it for and fixing up issues with external contributions.  Otherwise, you
effectively introduce a proprietary software mandate on any contributions.

FWIW, I don't think the license can be too bad if Red Hat are prepared to
sign up to it, but I'll leave others more knowledgable to comment more
on that.
-- 
Andrew :-)

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