Stepan Mishura <stepan.mishura <at> gmail.com> writes: > Also this can be applied, for example, to BC provider jar - we'll avoid > questions like: which version of BC did you use? Everybody will use jar that > is distributed with Harmony code base and is used to test it.
Not necessarily. When deploying software written in Java, distributions go to great lengths to ensure that what they redistribute is indeed free software. Ocassionally, that means removing proprietary software from binaries/sources distributed by the Apache Software Foundation (used to redistribute Sun's BCL licensed stuff a while ago, and may still do, see [1] for an example) in order to make them redistributable by other entities not interested in the bundled proprietary software. In addition, distributions are fixing the jar hell by streamlining the package dependencies to use packages of specific libraries, rather than each application bundling their own copies of XYZ.jar. In order to perform such necessary and useful work, knowing where from, at which version, and under which license bundled third party libraries are included is a great help for packagers, and other downstream users wishing to customize deployments of the application. cheers, dalibor topic [1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2005-08/msg00033.html
