I must report today that the restrictions imposed by the beta JDK
license have not been lifted.
As you know, the JDK 6 beta license requires a disclaimer that bars the
use of the code for any productive use. This restriction is meant to
forestall binary incompatibilities with the final, GA version of the
JDK. These incompatibilities might arise due to late-breaking changes in
the JDK during its beta cycle. Due to these late-breaking changes,
applications compiled against earlier, beta versions of the JDK could
behave erratically when run against the GA JDK.
Such a disclaimer would need to appear in the NOTICES file of any Derby
release built using the beta JDK's tools and libraries. This, in turn,
is unacceptable for GA releases of Derby. Therefore at this time we
cannot build a Derby release candidate which includes JDBC4
drivers--today those drivers can only be built using beta tools and
libraries. For this reason, we, the Derby community must change our
plan to ship imminently an official release of Derby that includes JDBC4.
I can see two alternatives for us:
1. Ship 10.2 on the current schedule but do not include the JDBC4
drivers. When run on Java SE 6, Derby 10.2 would continue to expose our
JDBC3 implementation. In addition, we would remove JDBC4-specific
documentation from our user guides and prune out the JDBC4-specific javadoc.
2. Delay the current 10.2 schedule until after JDK 6 goes GA. At that
time we could release a version of Derby which includes JDBC4 drivers.
Given the length of time since 10.1 was released, the uncertainty of the
exact date of JDK 6 shipment, and the number of new features included in
10.2, I think that (1) is a better plan. Of course, this is up to the
community to decide.
Regards,
-Rick
