[csw-maintainers] OpenCSW & JDK redistribution

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi,

after lots of talks to people from Sun about JDK/JRE
redistribution here is a status where we are now:

Anfang der weitergeleiteten E-Mail:
> Von: Dalibor Topic <Dalibor.Topic at Sun.COM>
>
> Hi Dagobert,
>
> Thank you for your call on Tuesday and for taking some time to
> chat today. I'm CC:ing the current maintainer of OpenJDK 6,
> Joe Darcy on this e-mail.
>
> As discussed during the calls we had, I've had another look at
> the different JDK licensing options and discussed your inquiry
> with others inside Sun. After looking at the typical use cases
> for the different licenses, I don't think that any of the existing
> non-open-source JDK licensing options fits OpenCSW's use case
> of distributing easily redistributable stand-alone binary packages
> of the JDK.
>
> According to http://www.opencsw.org/about :
>
> " OpenCSW.org is a community effort to build and distribute binary
> packages (CSW, aka "Community SoftWare" packages) for
> production-grade Solaris releases."
> [snip]
> "We added "Open" to our organizational name name, to indicate that
> the packages will always be freely "open and available to use" by
> anyone. There will never be a cost to use them, or copy them.
> Additionally, it is our goal (although we arent there yet), that
> all packages will have publically open and easily reproducible
> build frameworks."
>
> The only release of the JDK that would really let OpenCSW meet
> that goal and really fits the description of "Open" in "OpenCSW"
> is OpenJDK 6.
>
> So I would strongly encourage the OpenCSW project to look into
> packaging OpenJDK 6 as part of OpenCSW, like Fedora, OpenSUSE,
> Ubuntu, Debian and many other community efforts with similar
> goals and approaches have successfully done so far. I would
> love to be able to list OpenCSW alongside other projects on
> http://openjdk.java.net/install/ !
>
> You can get the latest source code release, OpenJDK 6 b16, at
> http://download.java.net/openjdk/jdk6/ . A description of the
> latest changes is at
> http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/openjdk_6_b16_source_bundle
>
> Unless you need the internal SNMP support, I would not bother
> with the binary plugs on the download page - the OpenJDK build
> should work fine without them, and the production-grade Linux
> distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS aren't
> packaging them either in their OpenJDK 6 builds.
>
> OpenJDK 6 doesn't come with a plugin or webstart implementation
> (yet). If you'd like to package an independent plugin and
> Webstart implementation, they are available through the IcedTea
> project at http//icedtea.classpath.org .
>
> In order to ensure that OpenCSW users are getting an OpenJDK 6
> build that's compatible with JDK 6, the OpenCSW project can
> apply for access to the JCK under the OpenJDK Community TCK
> License Agreement, and test its own OpenJDK 6 builds against
> the JCK. Please see the OpenJDK Conformance Group web site for
> details at http://openjdk.java.net/groups/conformance/ .
>
> If you decide to package OpenJDK 6, and during your work
> come up with bug fixes, and other improvements, it would be
> nice if you would submit them back to the OpenJDK project using
> the OpenJDK Bugzilla instance at http://bugs.openjdk.java.net .
>
> Happy packaging, and all the best for OpenCSW! And do let us
> know how things go - I'm regularly on #openjdk on irc.oftc.net
> during German afternoons / evenings.
>
> cheers,
> dalibor topic

Additionally, he suggested to make a meta-package with manual
download like some Linux distributions. Any volunteers for
packaging OpenJDK?


Best regards

  -- Dago