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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 06:29 PM EDT |
Ian Al is doing a great job but the 'EULA reverse-engineering provisions'
argument is completely irrelevant here.
FACT: icedTea is derrived from openJDK and GPL+CE licesed and has passed the
Sun/Oracle special-for-openJDK-TCK so gets the patent grants etc. Even Oracle
agree with this. IcedTea is fully compliant and can even call itself Java with
Oracles blessing.
We start by downloading the icedTea binary only - we do not download any
source.
What have we agreed to at this point? Nothing. The GPL only kicks in if we
redistribute the binary. Have we agreed to a EULA? No, in fact the GPL goes to
great length saying we cannot be forced to agree to a 3rd party EULA just to run
our icedTEA program. The GPL is our shield.
So we don't need any permission to run a regular java program of our own
creation under any license on icedTea which then uses a normal java language
features to request all availble APIs on the classpath.
This is something an IDE like eclipse would do - or a program that takes
different actions if a special API is available (say asynchronous IO which only
features in the latest version 7). Reflection is not like byte-code
de-compilation which would I would consider as unethical on GPL code if the
decompiled code is to be non-GPL. A Java API developer would reasonably expect
their code to be exposed to Reflection - or they should use something else like
c - or obfuscate their compiled code using a special tool like proGuard.
Reflection most definitely is not reverse engineering - since the implementation
code is not exposed. Only what the class advertises at run-time to the
virtual-machine as its callable methods.
The only thing close to a EULA here is the GPL which generally grants lots of
freedoms to the user and prohibits additional vendor EULAs and restrictions.
Whose name is in most of the GPL in icedTea? Sun/Oracle
Who said icedTea passes the TCK? Sun/Oracle
Oracle, through the GPL, have given us permission to extract the API using
reflection and they prohibit any EULAs being added since they used the GPL.
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