Sun's Java Licensing

[bpfonte]

Hi all,

I would like to submit an appliance that needs Sun's Java Development Kit installed but I'm concerned about the license. Can anyone clarify me if it is legal to redistribute a Virtual Machine with JDK preinstalled?!

Thanks in advance,

Bruno

[mblonsky]

I am no lawyer; but I think this is covered in Sun's Licensing:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/jre-1_5_0_06-license.txt

SUPPLIMENTAL LICENSE TERMS, Section B

and

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/jdk-1_5_0_06-license.txt

SUPPLIMENTAL LICENSE TERMS, Section B and C

[bpfonte]

Hi mblonsky,

Thank you for your clarification. I had already read that license and I interpreted as it is permitted to redistribute it. What's your interpretation?

I asked Sun the same question and it came as:

"The Java 2, Standard Edition (J2SE), the earlier

Java Development Kit (JDK), the Java 2 Runtime

Environment (JRE) and most of the java.sun.com

products and technologies are free to download

and to use for commercial programming, but not

to re-distribute."

--

Bruno

[DaveP]

I would ask Sun. Only they can give you a definitive answer.

Dave

[binxboll]

I really think it is incumbent upon VMware to make a clear statement regarding the acceptability of including certain common software in VMs. Many people are going to a lot of trouble here. Java is the most prominent example. Adobe Acrobat and Flash Player are two other obvious examples for which a decision should be fairly straightforward. Someone is going to have to do it eventually. Why not now, when it could potentially save a lot of wasted effort or allow someone to find a good alternative?

[mblonsky · Accepted solution]

Dave is correct... Only the owner of each software package can give a definitive answer. There's no way that our corporate lawyers are going to make a statement that pertains to another company's license.

If you are worried about these kinds of packages, it would be reasonable to document the steps a user has to go through to install a required piece of software. If you look at software like Apache Tomcat (open source), they do not include a JRE; but their documentation tells you that you must install it prior to running Tomcat...

Example Instructions from Tomcat: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/setup.html

Example Instructions from Building Tomcat from Source:

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/building.html

[bpfonte]

Hi,

Thank you all for your considerations on the subject.

I indeed asked Sun and already posted their answer...

The suggestion to keep Java out of the VM and include only the instructions on how to get it seems sensible to me.

--

Bruno

[mariuz]

seems that lincese changed , at least you can redistribute it with ubuntu/debian distro

https://jdk-distros.dev.java.net/

Message was edited by:

mariuz