OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21

[Mark Wielaard]

On Sun, 2011-05-08 at 23:14 +0100, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> From the OpenJDK source code base, it looks like the proprietary parts
> of Oracle's JDK slot in pretty cleanly to the OpenJDK tree.  If this
> is the case, is there any good reason why GPL binaries could not be
> provided, with the option to add on the proprietary extensions
> (alternative font renderer, colour management, graphics renderer,
> plugin, web start) under a separate license?  It seems pretty easy to
> me to provide a default which downloads both parts for the majority of
> users who don't care, while allowing those who do to just pick the
> Free part.

Yes, that is the idea behind the "Assembly Exception" to the GPL that
OpenJDK uses. http://openjdk.java.net/legal/assembly-exception.html and
http://openjdk.java.net/legal/exception-modules-2007-05-08.html
That allows you to distribute everything under the GPL with the
exception of those proprietary modules. Of course that doesn't work for
GNU/Linux distributions, which will want to use a fully free JDK
distribution, but it can for Oracle (or anybody else) who wants to
distribute all the free code freely, plus some binary blobs.

Cheers,

Mark