Change in Java SE 7 Reference Implementation license

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 21:11 Mon 25 Jul     , mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> 2011/7/25 17:00 -0700, ahughes at redhat.com:
> > On 15:07 Wed 20 Jul 2011, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> >> Shipping the RI is part of finishing the JCP Final Release,
> >> which is a different thing from shipping a supported product.
> >> 
> >> 2011/7/20 14:07 -0700, ahughes at redhat.com:
> >>> But aren't these kinda useless if they don't get security updates?
> >> 
> >> They're meant only for testing and reference use, primarily
> >> by implementors trying to get their implementations to pass
> >> the JCK.
> >> 
> >>> Will there be any useful GPL binaries?
> >> 
> >> Yes -- from Red Hat, Canonical, Debian, and other Linux distros
> >> as usual, I expect.
> > 
> > So, in other words, nothing changed and Oracle's implementation will
> > still be in proprietary binary form.
> 
> Oracle's commercial product implementation is still proprietary, though
> most of it is based upon the OpenJDK JDK 7 code base.
> 
> What's changed is that the Reference Implementations are based solely
> upon open-source code and binaries are available under the GPL, as
> explained here:
> 
>   http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_the
> 

Yes.  The issue here is I assumed these were one and the same thing
and so you'd be producing GPL binaries of 7 throughout its life, not
just some random binary snapshot that never changes.

Oh well, guess I was too hopeful.

> - Mark

-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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