JDK 1.5 Binaries

[Landon Fuller]

On Apr 5, 2006, at 08:08, Greg Lewis wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 09:42:06AM -0400, Adam Stroud wrote:
>> I have seen on the FreeBSD foundation site that the 1.5 JDK  
>> binaries are
>> supposed to be released by today.  Does anyone what the status of  
>> this is?
>
> They'll be released sometime today.

As a company, our use of FreeBSD/Java in a production environment has  
been predicated on the ability to fix any show-stopper bugs that we  
might stumble upon. In contributing these fixes to the FreeBSD  
community we  hoped to improve the state of Java on the platform,  
thereby increasing the size of the user base and encouraging further  
contributions by other entities -- a cyclical process, as it were. In  
this regard we've found, fixed, and submitted patches for a few  
issues. As illustrated by the membar crasher, there will likely  
continue to be serious, show-stopper bugs in the FreeBSD Java port,  
and the ability to fix these is critical to our operation.

Sun's new JIUL license intends to solve this problem for the greater  
Java community by allowing enterprises to find and fix issues  
internally, and submit their changes to Sun for inclusion in a future  
release. Sun has also introduced replacements for the SCSL: the Java  
Research License and the Java Distribution License. Meanwhile, the  
existing patchset is (was?) licensed under the SCSL. All these  
licenses are relatively complex, and I'm not a lawyer, leaving me  
wondering the following:

As an external entity, is there any way we can run the latest  
releases of Java while still having access to the source and  
contributing any fixes to the FreeBSD Java project?

"Thank you" to everyone who has contributed to the Java port and the  
creation, testing, and release of Java 1.5 binaries,
Landon Fuller
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