FreeBSD Foundation Announces Java License for Free

nt2UNIX writes: "There is an article on Daily Daemon News that the FreeBSD Foundation has announced the inclusion of a FreeBSD native SUN Java SDK and RunTime Environment for the January 2002 release of FreeBSD 4.5 The whole announcement can be found here."

Comments

Too bad the licensing blew it

[freebsd guy]

As a former FreeBSD committer, I worked extensively with the team that produced the JRE/JDK project. Since programming languages can only be protected by patents (not copyrights), our original intention was to craft a clean-room version of Java that we could release under the BSD license, just like everything else in our distribution. Unfortunately, manpower was tight, and we were not able to do it all on our own. Hence, we discussed the matter with Sun and (IMHO) compromised our principles (unrestricted distribution in source and binary forms) in order to get the project done.

Our experience should serve as an important lesson to open source developers who try to tackle too large a project by themselves: do not sell your soul to Corporate America. Sure, we have a native JRE/JDK, but the only advantage is that it is native - not Free in any stretch of the imagination. (Not even restricted-Free, e.g. GPL).

All that aside, I have been testing several snapshots of the Java tools and they are very responsive and stable. More so, I am afraid, than Blackdown - although the ultimate test will be to see how it compares with the JRE running on a Solaris/SPARC machine.

freebsd guy