Subject: Re: JDK / NetBSD
To: Simon J. Gerraty <sjg@zen.cdn.telstra.com.au>
From: Scott Bartram <scottb@orionsoft.com>
List: current-users
Date: 01/03/2000 23:44:01
There is a release candidate version of 1.1.8 for the i386 platform at
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/java/i386/1.1.8/
(Sorry I didn't get around to an announcement before the holiday...)

The recent press releases by Sun regarding the J2SE platform and
licensing/royalties are a little confusing. I'm trying to get
clarification directly from Sun on royalty-free binary distribution.
It's been 3 weeks and counting...

In the meantime, I've restarted the 1.2.2 port that I had suspended
for the reasons stated by Simon below.

scott


"Simon J. Gerraty" wrote:
> 
> Frank,
> 
> [Hope you don't mind me cc'ing current-users, but this may be of
> general interest]
> 
> > I heard that quick.com.au crashed, which explains why I could not
> > reach it. I hope it can be recovered.
> 
> Yes, its back - in a nice new case.  Filesystem damage was restricted
> to NetBSD/current - which was easily fixed by checking it out again
> :-)
> 
> > Anyway, I believe you did the NetBSD port of JDK. The last version
> > you did is 1.1.6, I think. 1.2 has been out for a bit now, and
> > more and more people are using it. The obvious question is: do you
> > plan to do 1.2 soon?
> 
> Actually I started on 1.2 quite a while ago.  I also have 1.1.8 but
> have not had a chance to unpack it yet.
> 
> As for 1.2, it is much cleaner than 1.1.x so I decided to start from
> scratch and make only the changes that were needed for NetBSD.  I've
> done most? of what is needed to attempt a build, but got a bit stuck on
> the context stuff - 1.1.x just uses setjmp etc, 1.2 seems to use that
> as well as some svr4 {get,set} context stuff, I was still trying to
> sort out the significance of that when the new license came out for
> 1.2.x
> 
> The new license for 1.2.x makes it impossible for us to do a port and
> make it freely available.  We could make patches available - but then
> every NetBSD site that wanted to use JDK 1.2.x would need to sign the
> Sun license - thus excluding themselves from working on kaffe and the
> like.
> 
> As I understand it, we could still do a jdk 1.2.x port but would need
> to fork out money for the test suite and need to pay royalties for
> each copy given away - not really viable :-) Linux are apparently
> exempt from this restriction.
> 
> All in all I didn't see much point persisting with a 1.2 port if it
> was going to be a dead end.  This is a real pain as I had _lots_ of
> things I wanted to work on that needed 1.2.
> 
> Perhaps we need to lobby Sun to grant NetBSD the same breaks as Linux
> since after all we are the ones that support all their old gear :-)
> 
> I'm changing jobs next week and will be moving to the SF Bay Area
> later this year - this may give me some more time to work on JDK ports
> - I'd like to at least do 1.1.8/i386 and sparc.  Though the opposite
> may end up happening :-)
> 
> --sjg