Jmagick politics

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2014 at 06:28:38PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> Most likely simpler than that...
> 
> It's a Java framework, and what with the main Java implementation being
> sorta-open-source, sorta proprietary to Sun Microsystems, I mean, to
> Oracle, well, there aren't vastly many Java things that get tied tightly
> into Linux distributions.
> 
> After all, if you require up-to-date Java, that requires that, as part of
> the installation process, that the would-be gentle user needs to click
> their way through licensing UIs at http://something.oracle.com.
> 
> For a long time, that discouraged distributions from giving themselves
> dependencies on Java.  (One might want to distinguish "critical"
> dependancies, e.g. - if you wrote a version of init in Java, from
> "noncritical" ones.  Tomcat would be an excellent case of the latter.  Mind
> you, having a bunch of apps that depend on Tomcat pushes things more in the
> "critical" direction...)
> 
> I notice that on one of my Debian systems, there are ~500 dependencies on
> JRE.  These tend to be somewhat repetitive, a cross product of ~100 apps x
> several versions of each, against "default-jre".  Quite a lot are framework
> items, like Tomcat, Eclipse, JBoss, Maven.

Well Debian moved to openjdk given they can't even distribute the official
jre/jdk anymore (even in non-free.  Seems oracle has gone back to the
kind of license terms that java used to have back when blackdown.org
was needed to package it up in some weird way for linux distributions).
Makes you think Oracle wants to prevent people from using Java.  Or maybe
they are just dumb.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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