Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Jun 2008 20:28 UTC, submitted by Rahul
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.
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Member since:2005-07-06
The GPL is not liberal , it's Free Software.
The JDK source was not always available and developer wher enot always able to debug all the problems.
What you conveniently forget is that it means that JAVA from now on , will not be a plug-in or an extension from now on , but will be inlcuded natively.
Member since:2005-07-07
The JDK source was not always available and developer wher enot always able to debug all the problems.
That would explain why I got to view the source to Java 1.1 that I downloaded off Sun's site sometime in '97.
The Java source code was always available. It was a separate download, and you had to click through another set of agreements, but you were always able to download it. Granted, you were not able to distribute the changes you made to the JDK though you could send the patches upstream to Sun.
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Member since:
2008-06-12
Hear Hear.
Also what a lot of people conviently tend to forget is the fact that the JDK source has always been available. Just not under a license as liberal as the GPL.
But the advantage for a developer being able to debug trough the whole stack of the JDK has always been available.