JavaFX runtime redistribution

[Daniel Zwolenski]

I am no lawyer and not connected to Oracle in anyway. 

My personal interpretation from reading the licence is that we have permission to redistribute JFX if, and ONLY if, it is bundled within our own custom application and only if that application adds some considerably different functionality to what jfx does by itself. As I understand it, this is similar to the licence for the jre itself.  

I have taken this to mean that I could bundle it into my app which allows users to do safety audits on mining equipment but that I could not, for example, put jfx in a maven repository which would redistribute the jar as is, without adding any functionality. 

Whether this applies to your situation or not, I couldn't say for sure. My interpretation would suggest that the final thing you produce (eg the exe or Mac app, etc) can have jfx bundled in it, however the developer using your tool might have to download each jfx jar themselves and point your tool at them rather than you include these in your tool directly. 

As Tom says you are very unlikely to get a direct reply from anyone at oracle on this. When it comes to legals the American national pastime of suing each other for fun has everyone dodging this sort of stuff. 

Also of possible interest, when everything is finally open sourced as part of the openjdk project then the licence for this is much more permissive allowing general redistribution by my interpretation. 

I hate this stuff. 

On 25/04/2012, at 1:21 PM, Tom Eugelink <tbee at tbee.org> wrote:

> 
> I'm guessing the answer you will get is "read the license yourself" (slight frustration peeking through in that remark, yes).
> 
> Tom
> 
> 
> 
> On 2012-04-25 04:22, Josh Marinacci wrote:
>> As of recent versions of JavaFX we are allowed to redistribute the runtime.  Does this include repackaging the runtime to be inside our apps (skipping the JavaFX runtime installer)?  Does this include redistributing the runtime to other people who want to redistribute it?  Allow me to explain.
>> 
>> I'm working on an update to my AppBundler Ant task.  Right now you give it a descriptor file and some directories of jars, then it will produce a Mac .app, a Windows .exe, a JNLP, and a single clickable jar.
>> 
>> I can manually make it include the magic jars for JavaFX as well. However, the Oracle website only lets you download one JavaFX SDK at a time. You must choose if you want Mac, Windows, or Linux.  So I had to manually download the zips for each platform (rather than the installer versions), uncompress them,  then move the RT jars and native libs for each platform to a place inside my project.
>> 
>> What I would like to do is redistribute a zip where all of that work has been done to create a universal JavaFX runtime suitable for use with AppBundler.
>> 
>> Alternatively, if the above won't suit Oracle's lawyers, I'd like a place to download a unified RT  from Oracle containing the native libs for all platforms, and then I'll create a script that the dev can use to do the processing.  (Even better would be putting the JavaFX runtime into an Oracle hosted Maven repo!)
>> 
>> thanks,
>> Josh
>> 
> 
>