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

[Leroy Tennison]

Ralph Green, Jr. wrote:

>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?
>>    
>>
>
>
>
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>  
>
Thank you, that gives me a much clearer picture of the issues.