Dear Maik,
On 01/02/2019 14:52, Maik Schmidt wrote:
Hi all,
I'm a bit surprised that this issue has not been broached here yet, but
from what I understand, Oracle has changed their licensing for Java [1]
in way that it might make it problematic to have the Oracle JDK
installed on HPC systems for general use, because it might make them
liable to pay licensing fees if it is used for commercial purposes.
Also, there currently only seem to be easyconfigs/-blocks for Oracle
Java available in EasyBuild. How does the community or other sites plan
to handle this? Wouldn't it make sense to prepare OpenJDK modules by now
and spot potential compatibility issues with different software that
relies on Java?
Curious about your thoughts.
Sorry for not responding to this earlier.
You make a good point, and Oracle has been doing a great job pushing
people away from the Oracle JDK releases (like the hunt you have to do
to even find out where to downloaded the installation files for specific
versions).
Together with the licensing change, I think it makes sense we try and
make the jump to OpenJDK, which is exactly what I'm doing with this pull
request: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/7847 .
It turns out that the OpenJDK releases use the same installation
procedure as Oracle JDK 1.8.x does (i.e. just unpack), so we can keep
using the existing Java easyblock for this.
My intention is to migrate to OpenJDK in the near future, maybe even for
the 2019a generation of easyconfigs (but I'm not sure about how
different Java 11 is from Java 8, and whether it's backwards compatible
enough..).
regards,
Kenneth
