OpenJDK projects promoting proprietary builds

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Dmitri,

On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 16:20 -0700, Dmitri Trembovetski wrote:
> Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> > On May 30, 2009, at 7:05 PM, David Herron wrote:
> >> Please recall that JDK<n> != OpenJDK<n> though for values of n >= 7 the
> >> difference is very small.  The JDK7 builds have some proprietary bits in
> >> them.
> > 
> > Why?  For heaven's sake... why?
> 
>    Because the corresponding open source parts aren't good enough yet and we 
> don't have enough resources to make them on par with the proprietary bits 
> although this is what we want in the long run.
> 
>    Specific parts that I know of are color management, AA shape rasterizer and 
> font rasterizer.

Sure, I might not like that there are still proprietary bits around even
though we have free replacements, but I understand that they are still
around. That doesn't mean you need to use a different license from the
rest of us. http://openjdk.java.net/legal/ clearly spells out the rules.
You may ship these proprietary blobs together with the larger GPLed
parts thanks to the Assembly Exception. That means you can just ship
everything under free terms except for these remaining blobs if you
really want to. No need to get some special terms different from the
rest of the community.

Also I agree with Andrew, if you keep only shipping the proprietary
blobs and not the free replacements you will have less incentive to help
us all improve the free bits.

Lastly this is not really relevant for most of the OpenJDK stack except
some parts of the graphics stack, why would the nio2 project for
example, ship early access builds under a completely proprietary
license?

Cheers,

Mark