> Not to mention that it's distasteful from an information freedom
> perspective. Here we have Freenet, which enables one to redistribute
> stuff far and wide, but we're asking users not to distribute the
> program itself? Seems kind of lame.
All of the legalese stuff I agree is something that needs to be looked
into and figured out. However, I disagree with the point that we can't
distribute Sun's JRE for political-sociological-institutional consistency
reasons. First of all, *we* are not asking them not to distribute the JRE,
we are telling them that the JRE is convered by Sun's licensing and *Sun*
is telling them that they can't redistribute it and we are letting them
know this. Many free software projects redistribute libraries which are
covered under different licenses and it is quite typical to put in a
license notice with notes saying "Except for the foo package, which is
under the MPL and the bar package, which is under the SCSL." This is
standard practice for bundling things that are under multiple licenses. So
we're not doing anything particularly weird there.
Now as far as the whole issue of using the Sun JRE at all, I have no
problem with it. Freenet does not *require* non-free software, and that's
the big win. Users are not *required* to submit to Sun's licensing. We are
giving them the option to accept some stupid licensing in exchange for not
having to install the JRE themselves and I think many people will be very
happy about this and it will make things all around better for users. This
is a reasonable justification for doing it. We should always give users
easier options as as long as we don't take the more pure options away.
The ultra-purists will be running Debian anyway as it's the only entirely
free thing, except for maybe BSD, but the purists will still be running
Debian, and they have apt-get and so don't need to worry about this.
Mainly this is for the Windows users and they obviously aren't free
software purists.
So I can't really see this bothering anyone except for people that post
comments on slashdot.
But we should definitely figure out the legal ramifications, particularly
who is accepting the license and what we're required to do once
he/she/we/it/they accept it.
Also, if there is a fully free JVM that will run Freenet and actually
works and doesn't suck them we should obviously use that instead. I've had
no joy with Kaffe for the length of my relationship with Java. Not to rag
on the Kaffe developers, more power to them. But unless Freenet runs well
on a given JVM then it's not a viable thing to use. I'll download Kaffe
for Windows and see how it goes.
A couple more points. First of all, obviously server apps don't bundle a
JRE so they make bad examples. Only programs intended for users with low
computer skills would bundle a JRE.
Also, thanks for being paranoid about this.
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