Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Jun 2008 20:28 UTC, submitted by Rahul
Java Back in May 2006, Sun announced during the JavaOne conference it would release Java as open source, licensed as GPL software. While it was released as GPL, it still contained about 5 percent proprietary, non-free code - the Java trap, as the FSF calls it. The FSF called to dismantle this trap, and now the IcedTea project has reached an important milestone.
Permalink for comment 319250
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[2]: The Java Trap
by segedunum on Thu 19th Jun 2008 22:07 UTC in reply to "RE: The Java Trap"
segedunum
Member since:
2005-07-06

While the individuals involved are to be congratulated on technical achievement, I still feel that the whole "Java Trap" was more political than practical.

As it was, it was impossible to simply ship a JRE or a JDK in a distribution as-is, and it was impossible for people to debug and track bugs in the tradition of open source development against such a piece of software.

If anyone deserves a large amount of credit here, it is Sun for listening to their developers and doing what they asked for.

Apart from the last five percent, which we have heard nary anything from Sun on in the past two years other than "We're working on it". Net effect? You still needed a JRE or a JDK from Sun.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 8