Non-Free non-firmware Software in Fedora 9?!?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Mar 20, 2008, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> wrote:

> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438421

I apologize for jumping to conclusions based on the package name and
the announcement I saw at 
http://developer.redhatmagazine.com/2008/03/12/openjdk-to-replace-icedtea-in-fedora-9/

quoted at

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats/Java

  Sun has replaced most of the encumbrances for which IcedTea was
  providing replacements.

*most* was not enough for me or for Fedora.  But there's clarification
in the bug report as to what actually happened.  IIUC, it's still
IcedTea, but now under the OpenJDK name, and it's based on a post-JDK6
snapshot of OpenJDK that has had many of the encumbered bits replaced
with Free Software bits, and the few remaining bits under dubious
licenses have been safely removed to form Fedora's java-1.6.0-openjdk.

IMHO it should still be somehow marked to distinguish it from Sun's
[Open]JDK6, and the messaging especially in the release notes should
make it clear that *all* of the encumbered bits have been removed from
Fedora's package, such that it is actually Free Software.

I hope this helps,

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}