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Sun Unilaterally Revokes the FreeBSD Java License

Posted by CowboyNeal on

ravenII writes "The FreeBSD foundation has announced the news of Sun terminating the SCSL OEM-like license given to FreeBSD foundation. The foundation's attempts to contact Sun to renegotiate the license have gone unanswered. Javalobby.org also carries the news." It would seem that Sun has terminated all SCSL licenses across the board in preparation for the release of Java 5, and while the renegotiation process may be a bit bumpy, it's likely that Java will continue to be ported to FreeBSD.

2 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. I never understood by miyako · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I never understood how it's good for Sun to prohibit the redistrobution of Java with BSD or Linux.
    It seems to me that any benefits there might be would be lost because they are opening themselves up to having an open source, or at least more easily re-distributable JVM become the most common, and therefore standard, VM.
    Besides, if they are giving it away for free anway, what benefit is there to forcing anyone who wants it to get it from Sun?

    --
    Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
  2. Better alternatives to Java by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There are now much better alternatives to Java for many programming tasks.

    I've switched over to Ruby and my productivity has skyrocketed. Anyone who's done object-relational mapping using Java for example, should take a look at how Ruby does it using ActiveRecord.

    I still use C++ for some programming tasks but find the need to do so less frequent each year. Thank God for smartpointers (boost library).

    I might take a look at OCaml in the near future. Heard great things about it.