IcedTea on Appliances

[Ken Gilmer]

Jonathan,  FWIW my company plans to ship OpenJDK with our product Real Soon Now.

thx
ken



----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Wielaard" <mark at klomp.org>
To: "Jonathan Tripathy" <jonnyt at abpni.co.uk>
Cc: distro-pkg-dev at openjdk.java.net
Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2010 2:42:41 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: IcedTea on Appliances

On Wed, 2010-05-05 at 18:27 +0100, Jonathan Tripathy wrote:
> On 05/05/10 18:23, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-05-05 at 17:26 +0100, Jonathan Tripathy wrote:    
> >> Is someone allowed to distribute IcedTea with an "Appliance" (e.g. Set
> >> Top Box, Firewall, etc..) without paying Oracle for a licence?
> >>      
> > Of course! It is all GPLed.
> > We even have a cross compile FAQ to help you out if you need to build
> > for an embedded machine on which you cannot build things directly:
> > http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/CrossCompileFaq
> >
> Your answer is the answer I was hoping to hear, but the others are 
> putting doubts in my head...

They are just being cautious. I guess people asking legal questions are
suspicious, they might be plotting to sue you if you give them the
"wrong" answer :) But if you are fine with shipping something like
Debian or Fedora on/with your appliance you will most likely be fine
with IcedTea since both ship with it. Just pay respect to the users and
make sure you provide them with the freedom the GPL grants you and them.

I bought an Acer Aspire One a while ago and they shipped with IcedTea:
http://gnu.wildebeest.org/diary/2008/09/24/free-java-for-your-netbook-aspire-one-with-icedtea/

Cheers,

Mark