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Sun Joins the Free Software Foundation
RLiegh writes "Ars Technica reports that Sun has joined the FSF Corporate Patron program. The article explains that the FSF corporate program allows companies to provide financial assistance to the FSF in return for license consulting services. The article goes on to observe that this move is doubtlessly motivated by Sun's interest in GPL3's direction. Now that Sun has opened up Java and become an FSF corporate sponsor...could the move to dual license OpenSolaris under the GPL3 be far behind?"
Because java doesn't insert itself magically into the apt repository the second Sun relicenses it. This takes work.
Because they're not done yet. Supposedly, that'll happen soon. When that happens I imagine Debian will be among the first to distribute the GPL source derived binaries. What they have thus far is the hotspot jvm and javac. There's a few parts left, before it's really useful without the closed source tools. You're of course welcome to be skecptical until they make good on that deadline.
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It's not open-source yet. These things take time, be patient. I think they said they'll finish the process by the middle of 2007.
My understanding is that JSE6 is not GPL'd because they did not want to delay its release. This means that the old licensing concerns with distributing Java on GPL'd platforms are still a concern. Though much if not most of the JVM has already been "open source," they were not GPL'd. JSE7 will be GPL'd if all goes according to plan, however, and Sun is now aiming to go straight to the GPL3. Here is JSE6's current license.
You can do that now since OpenSolaris (www.opensolaris.org) source is available just not under GPL3.
I've experienced Solaris and its predecessors from the early 80's. Their kernels used to crash from memory leaks, corrupt data, contain Trojans, use linear search in inappropriate places, crash on bad system call arguments, fold under load, and lots of other problems. It's good that after 20 years, they finally got most of the bugs out, but it's never going to be "amazing work". From a practical point of view, Linux has matured much faster, and I don't think Linux has anything to learn from Solaris.
In the end, the differences between the current crop of UNIX-like kernels won't matter much. All of them have roughly the same functionality, most of them are fairly mature and stable, and all of them give you performance close to machine. And under the hood, they're all ugly and messy.
So, personally, I'm sticking with Linux. Solaris might be slightly "better", but not in a way that matters, and far more people are contributing to Linux (in particular, drivers).
Because the package name is sun-java6-jdk (and others in sun-java6-*), and it's in non-free (or multiverse on Ubuntu).
Java 7 will be released under GPL3, so expect to see that in main.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Here.
Debian derivative. Uses Solaris as it's kernel.
Or perhaps it was motivated by Sun's desire to buy their way into the "free" software community's good graces without fully embracing its approach.
What the HELL are you talking about?? After Java was open sourced Stallman said: "I think that Sun with this contribution has contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. And it shows leadership -- it's an example I hope others will follow.". What more do you want?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die