[NTLUG:Discuss] What's the deal with Java?

[Ralph Green, Jr.]

Howdy,
  As Lance said, many people object to the
licensing on Java.  Think of it this way.
OpenOffice 2 has dependencies on a package
that is free to distribute, but controlled
by one company.  If people want to make
modifications to OpenOffice, they have to
deal with a major component that they cannot
get the source to and which they cannot modify.
That is not good, if it is important to you
that your application be really open source.
So, people are looking at substituting other
Java components that have more open licenses.
 
  To most Open Source advocates, free as in
speech is much more important than free as in
beer.  It is nice that Sun gives away Java
runtimes and I even understand why they have
not open sourced Java, I think.  That lack of
an open source license on Java, though has
ramifications.  And the most significant is
that it discourages people from building on
top of it.

 If you want to see an example of how this
kind of thing has played out in the past, I
suggest you look at QT.  QT is a set of
graphics libraries that KDE is built upon.
There were so many people concerned about
the non-free nature of the QT libraries at
one time that Gnome was born and developed
into a serious contender.  A lot of people
are really serious about this stuff.  We
don't want someone to be able to get a
hammerlock on the systems and the only way
to do that is to be sure that we only support
open source packages for the important stuff.
Good day,
Ralph

On Sun, 2005-06-26 at 21:33 -0500, Leroy Tennison wrote:
> Concerning OpenOffice.org v2 I saw the comment that Java wasn't free and 
> it's causing a stir.  I can download a Java runtime free, right?  I 
> ...do I?  So what's the big deal?