On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 09:05:43AM +0100, Dave Hooper wrote: > Um, no, I want confirmation from Sun that *what we are doing* is ok. As you > say, she said "to get the jre... the user also always gets the Freenet > software".
Carla Schroer is the Total Readiness Manager for J2SE and the answers she gave me were after several days of consultation internally with Sun's legal council. She was referred to me by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun. I asked her: "Is it acceptable for us to have the JRE downloaded from our website, from a location that is not advertised, meaning that the JRE could not be downloaded independently of Freenet? This is important as asking our users to visit Sun's website before installing our software really isn't acceptable - most users simply wouldn't have the patience to do this." She replied: "I don't think we care about what server the bits come from as long as to get the JRE from you the user also always get the freenet software. In other words they can't get just the JRE from freenet. If users want just the JRE, point them to Sun. Of course, you can distribute the freenet software without the JRE, and you can have a single installer that handles all these cases." > We *cannot* host the jre independently on www.freenetproject.org. Which is > what Sun have explicitly stated, on several occasions. The 'confirmation' > you have received does not unconditionally allow us to do that which Sun > have previously denied us. The fact that one Sun lawyer got it wrong in the past doesn't mean that she can't be corrected by another Sun lawyer later on. > Sun have already come back to me to tell me we can't do that. Which bit of > my argument did you not understand? The part where I HAVE RECEIVED AN OK FROM A SUN LAWYER TO WHOM I WAS REFERRED BY SUN'S FOUNDER AND CHIEF SCIENTIST. Which bit of that don't you understand? Even in the face of conflicting advice from Sun, I think we are more than justified in going with the advice provided most recently by someone that is presumably more senior. > Anyway, there's now a potential new alternative. Java 1.4.2 (which no > longer appears to be 'beta' and seems to work ok with Freenet 5028 as of me > trying this weekend) comes with an 'install from the web' option to install > only the components needed. Admittedly this contacts Sun's servers to > download the jre components. But I'm not sure that this is much worse than > directing the user to download manually from Sun's servers. Alternatively > the full Java 1.4.2 runtime is an approx 15MB file to include inside > freenet-java-webinstall.exe > D > We need to get as close to a situation as possible where the user doesn't even need to know that freenet relies on Java. Anything that gets us closer to that is fine by me - but the current situation isn't. Ian. -- Ian Clarke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Coordinator, The Freenet Project http://freenetproject.org/ Weblog http://slashdot.org/~sanity/journal
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