On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 12:25 PM, dalibor topic <dalibor.to...@oracle.com> wrote: > On 29.07.2016 11:43, Andrew Dinn wrote: >> >> Jigsaw code from a debugger. Not everyone involved is in a position to >> build (and keep on rebuilding) a Jigsaw JDK9 release from scratch. > > > Broadly speaking, Early Access builds try to serve the needs of the many, > rather than the needs of the few. > > The latter group does have the option of producing their own builds based > off the source code in corresponding OpenJDK forests to address needs > currently not served, being able to strike their own balance between needs > and effort required to satisfy them. > > I would assume such needs to typically be short-term, such as the temporary > need for a special build with some debugging property. > > Externalizing the effort to produce and manage short-term build efforts > allows them to take place, and conclude at their own pace without adding > additional burdens on the production and the often very short lifecycle of > the mainstream ones. > > In short, if the answer to the question "will almost everyone, including all > the users that don't care at all about working on OpenJDK, need this in an > Early Access build during all the years or months of the development of a > JDK Release Project or a feature" is a resounding yes, then it may make > sense for the mainstream builds. > > If not, then probably not.
I don't follow this. The original problem Andrew pointed is about including the full set of sources in the build, which I understand is Oracle policy not to, but it doesn't look like it has anything to do with serving the needs of the many rather than the needs of the few. The key problem though is the license of such builds. EA are covered by a rather restrictive License Agreement, and this is what Andrew refers to as "self-defeating", really. According to that License, there's a number of things you can't do, such as: "not to cause or permit the disassembly, reverse compilation, or reverse engineering of the Oracle Technology, except as otherwise specified by law", "developing no more than a single prototype of each of Your applications" and "Any Feedback shall be Oracle Confidential Information". Again, I don't see how this serves the purpose of the many against the few. This is just a Company wide policy that doesn't make any sense but we can't seem to be able to change into a reasonable one. Specifically for Jigsaw, and especially the first and last points I mentioned, this is totally nonsense because we're talking about a technology with great possible implications both on end users and OpenJDK developers. That said, I do concur that we should be building OpenJDK ourself in lack of proper binary builds, I also concur that we should not generally confuse Oracle JDK with OpenJDK, particularly when it comes to binary builds, but unfortunately this distinction is not always clear, and in this case it's made worse because the project page points to those binary builds. While it's certainly possible to build your own version of OpenJDK, as Andrew put it once again, the License of the builds Oracle is making available to developers is "self-defeating". Rather than justifying it, let's just assume the policy doesn't make any sense, and live with it then :) Cheers, Mario
