Sun Unilaterally Revokes the FreeBSD Java License

ravenII writes "The FreeBSD foundation has announced the news of Sun terminating the SCSL OEM-like license given to FreeBSD foundation. The foundation's attempts to contact Sun to renegotiate the license have gone unanswered. Javalobby.org also carries the news." It would seem that Sun has terminated all SCSL licenses across the board in preparation for the release of Java 5, and while the renegotiation process may be a bit bumpy, it's likely that Java will continue to be ported to FreeBSD.

I never understood

[miyako]

I never understood how it's good for Sun to prohibit the redistrobution of Java with BSD or Linux.
It seems to me that any benefits there might be would be lost because they are opening themselves up to having an open source, or at least more easily re-distributable JVM become the most common, and therefore standard, VM.
Besides, if they are giving it away for free anway, what benefit is there to forcing anyone who wants it to get it from Sun?

Better alternatives to Java

[Anonymous Coward]

There are now much better alternatives to Java for many programming tasks.

I've switched over to Ruby and my productivity has skyrocketed. Anyone who's done object-relational mapping using Java for example, should take a look at how Ruby does it using ActiveRecord.

I still use C++ for some programming tasks but find the need to do so less frequent each year. Thank God for smartpointers (boost library).

I might take a look at OCaml in the near future. Heard great things about it.

Re:I never understood

[swdunlop]

One of the last standing feature points for Solaris has over most other OS's is first tier support by Sun's JRE's -- it is Sun's best interest to confuse and cripple any efforts to make ports of the VM that make good use of the host operating system's strengths, to protect what is becoming the last good reason to use Solaris in the datacenter.

Sun's SCSL was originally a poorly considered defense against a licensee trying to pull the same embrace, pervert and promote strategy that Microsoft employed with their JVM, but it has become a way for Sun to try to make some money off its competitors with convoluted license issues.

Re:that's why java should be gpl'd

[BoomerSooner]

Actually it's why Java should be ignored. You're just as safe using an MS product as you are a Sun product. Actually with Sun's bleek future I would say being a MS shop is significantly more secure. I love Tomcat but this is one more reason to be wary.

1/2 my companies applications run on Tomcat the other half run on IIS. They both are behind firewalls and are both very stable (you don't have to reboot for every windows update, just stop and restart the services the same way you do in Unix-based OSes).

I'm a big fan of the new .Net architecture and the VS.Net tools that now allow you to step through ASP.Net code and SQL Stored Procedures. I guess I'm one of the rare people who like almost every platform available to develop on. ASP/SQL Server & JSP/PostgreSQL are my favorites.

Re:I never understood

[Sunspire]

One of the last standing feature points for Solaris has over most other OS's is first tier support by Sun's JRE's

Which is kind of funny considering the Solaris JRE is pretty much widely considered to be the worst version available. As anyone who has had the "pleasure" of working with said version will know, it has had a whole slew of issues and is to this day not on par with the Linux or Windows versions.

The real problem, to me is that ...

[hummassa]

As I said in another post (#11167772 [slashdot.org]), I believe every producer of what lawyers call "Intellectual Property" should be remunerated mainly by producing it and less by generating a lot of copies of it.

This is, mainly, what happens today to the real *producer*: programmers get salaries, journalists (who are the *real* writers in terms of quantity) get salaries... while Britney/Eminem gets a lot of $$$ for ... well ... being themselves, and Sony/EMI/*AA-affiliate gets the REAL $$$^$$$ for copying and distributing it. Do you get the difference?

Re:Better alternatives to Java

[iggymanz]

I used to program in LISP, but I find that Ruby takes alot less typing. Closures in LISP need macros so they don't look so complex & don't wear out one's fingers.

Microsoft and Mono

[jeif1k]

Microsoft doesn't have any control over Mono: Mono combines the ECMA core (which is clearly free and unencumbered) with standard FOSS libraries like Gnome and Gtk+.

So: using Java is not safe from a legal perspective because Sun owns Java, both the major implementations and the platform itself. On the other hand, using Mono is safe from a legal perspective (at least no less safe than any other free platform) because Microsoft clearly doesn't own it.