Am Sonntag, den 30.12.2007, 12:49 -0600 schrieb Les Mikesell: > It would be better if you tried to understand the consequences of this > choice instead of blindly defending it. As with most decisions in real life: most benefits in one dimension have drawbacks in others. If I want the freedom of free software, I may have to struggle with issues in using non-free software. It is simply a matter of choice (and conscious decision). > > Fedora did not choose "not to be compatible with..." but Fedora choosed > > not to include an non-free program (i.e. Sun's Java) > > They did both. Including or not including isn't the issue. Making it > difficult for the user to install his own freely available copy is one > problem. Fedora does not make it specifically difficult. You may install the Sun provided Linux rpm, are free to search the Sun bugzilla database why it doesn't work out of the box (doesn't work in any Linux distribution, the bug report is some years old and Sun choosed not to fix it), install one of the suggested workarounds (e.g. edit a shell script in /etc/profile.d) and you are ready to go. As with any distributions Fedora does only care about software, which is part of its distribution. Third party vendors have to care ybout their software. And don't confuse the Fedora model with RHEL. In RHEL Red Hat takes care about Sun java integration and customers have to pay for it. Or the former SuSE distribution where SuSE made a different regarding the licence issue. > A whole separate 'jpackage' project has to exist just to fix > this problem in the distribution. The problem wouldn't exist if the > distribution included a java-*-sun-compat package of perfectly legal > symlinks. You may think of the jpackage distribution as just another workaround for the fact that Sun didn't care about Linux compatibility of their Linus rpm's. And it is a general purpose workaround, not a Fedora specific one. > The bigger problem is distributing something that is not java compatable > but executing it with the java name. Microsoft tried to promote an > incompatible program that similarly fit their agenda with the java name > and Sun successfully sued them over it. The fedora-shipped not-java > program that executes with the java name does just as much damage and > shouldn't be named java until it passes the compatibility tests. I'm > surprised fedora's legal dept. allowed this abuse of a trademarked name. The software is not shipped as java, but as gcj (and with some starter scripts with the filenama java for compatibility). And in contrast to MS the gcj project aimed to full compatibility and the lack thereof was an intermediate state during development. All this is quite different. > > So you can develope (or simply run) against the reference version and > > you can test (and support the devel of) the truly free alternative in > > parallel. That's the Fedora way. > > It's not an alternative java until it passes the compatibility test. You are free, not to use (and just to ignore) it! Remember, you just have to use one of the above mentioned alternative ways. Peter
