<< The Problem With Threads | Home | Tom Wheeler Wins The 2006 NetBeans Community Award >>

JDK On GNU/Linux: All But Fedora

I'm disappointed that Fedora is not part of the deal.

Simon Phipps: All that just ended. An unprecedented collection of Debian developers, Ubuntu developers, Sun engineers and Sun lawyers has spent months devising a new binary license for the Java platform, together with the parts for new installers, so that the Java platform is available on GNU/Linux in a way that "just works". Yes, you can now apt-get install sun-java5-jre and have it install without fuss on Debian and Ubuntu. Gentoo will have it soon too.

I bet the Red Hat folks are saying: "It's still not Free Software!" And the Sun folks are laughing there heads off: "Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah."

As a long time Red Hat/Fedora user, all I want to say is "Guys, work it out. Make it so that I can yum install sun-java5-jdk and have it installed without fuss."

(If they don't, I'll give up Java altogether and become a Ruby-on-Rails fanatic.)

Tags :
Responses[2] RSS feed for responses to this blog entry
Posted by Weiqi Gao on May 16, 2006 7:43:42 AM CDT #


Reply

Re: JDK On GNU/Linux: All But Fedora

Comment from Simon Phipps on May 17, 2006 11:44:47 PM CDT #
Actually, the folks at Red Hat were pretty positive about DLJ. But you don't have to wait for them (or Sun). The bits to build a package for Fedora are at jdk-distros - anyone can go make a package and contribute it to their favourite distro.
Reply

Re: JDK On GNU/Linux: All But Fedora

Comment from Weiqi Gao on May 18, 2006 12:32:43 AM CDT #

Thanks Simon. That's great to hear.

What would be nicer is if Sun extend the same OS distro license to all the formerly freely available from Sun's website but non-redistributables.

What would be even nicer is to extend similar license to entities like JPackage. Last time I installed all the Java stuff, I have to manually download 16 packages from Sun.

Wouldn't it be nice for any Linux user to say "Give me Tomcat" (yum install tomcat5 for Fedora Core) and Tomcat (and all its dependencies, including a JRE) will be installed and configured to automatically start up and ready to server?


Add a comment Send a TrackBack