On Saturday, July 14, 2012 9:40:43 AM UTC-7, jddarcy wrote: > > There are some blog entries from Oracle on the JDK licensing situation > including > > "JRockit is Now Free (and Other Java License Updates)" > https://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/jrockit_is_now_free_and >
A) That blog post continuously conflates a JDK and a JVM, so how am I supposed to trust the accuracy of the rest of what he says? B) It continuously obfuscates the answers in corporate double-speak. for instance: Q: Are you planning on making JRockit open source? > A: The converged JVM will be made available through > OpenJDK<http://openjdk.java.net/>. > We will not open-source the current JRockit implementation. > Note that he does not say that JRockit will be open source. Only that it will be made available through the OpenJDK web site. If Oracle was truly planning to make the converged HotSpot/JRockit code open source, don't you think they would have just come out and said so? Plus look at these two snippits from the blog post: JRockit is now free (gratis) for development and internal production use on > general purpose computers. > Q: I am a developer, does this mean I can now use JRockit Mission Control > for free? > A: Yes, there is no cost for development use. See the > license<http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html>for > details. > Note how he says it is free "for development" but says nothing about "for distribution." So, it doesn't cost me anything to write the code (ain't that sweet of them), but it may or may not cost me if I want to distribute that code anywhere outside of my company? For clarification he directs us to the license agreement that caused me the confusion in the first place. > > > How the heck am I supposed to make sure that a particular garbage > collector > > does not end up being used when my program runs? > > On that point in particular, quoting from "Java 7 Questions & Answers > " https://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/java_7_questions_answers > > "Q: I read the JDK 7 license. It mentions something about Commercial > Features, what does that mean? > A: Sun versioned the end user license together with the binary, which > made it clear what terms applied for a particular release. However, it > also meant that a Java user would have to re-review the license for > every new release (including update release), which lead to > uncertainty around future licensing conditions. Oracle's approach is > to minimize the number of licenses used for Java - ideally getting it > down to only one. This means a more predictable and stable licensing > situation, at the cost of a slightly more complex license text since > it needs to be able to cover more scenarios. When we made JRockit free > we modified the Binary Code License to make it cover all versions of > Java, as well as JRockit. This was announced in one of my previous > blog posts. The "Commercial Features" clause is there to allow us to > port over value-add features from JRockit to the converged > Hotspot/JRockit JVM starting with JDK 7. Full details on what features > are non-free can be found in the product documentation. In the > standard JDK 7 GA binaries, there are no commercial features so there > is no risk that you use them by mistake. As we move such features to > JDK 7 in a future update, our plan is to require an explicit flag to > enable them. Note that these features are only restricted "for any > commercial or production purpose" so individual developers need not > worry. For full information, read the license text itself. " Well, this is where I read that the "Full details on what features are non-free can be found in the product documentation." But I don't see how it addresses how to specify whether a particular garbage collector does or does not get used when my code runs. In the end all this verbiage from Oracle just sounds like a bunch of gobledegook corporate-speak designed to make it sound as if it might be OK to write code in Java but to never be entirely clear so they can always jump in and say, "Oh your program violates our terms, you have to pay us money." That is why I posted in this group asking for a better explanation. So far, it seems my options are: A) Use Oracle's JVM & JDK. Know that everything will work according to the documentation but always be in doubt as to whether I am legally allowed to distribute my code without paying Oracle money. B) Use OpenJDK. Accept that I will have to work through bugs and incompatibilities and be concerned as to whether I am legally allowed to distribute my code without violating the GPL (which could still cost me money if I had wanted to profit from keeping that code proprietary). Perhaps I will contact some companies who are selling proprietary programs written in Java as well as some open-source projects written in Java and see if they had to become a "Licensee" or if they had any trouble avoiding the "commercial features." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. 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