Developers Criticize Licensing Issues for Sun’s JDK 7

Nov 17, 2009

Milestone 5 for the coming Java Development Kit 7 includes just minor changes. Despite these little updates, JDK 7 has caused quite a stir.

The reason for the turbulence surrounding these developments lies on the fact that Sun has not elected an Open Source license. Classpath developer Mark Wielaard calls this move “antisocial”, referring to the large share of the software that is part of OpenJDK. Wielaard calls out to Sun to remove this legal, proprietary restriction as it is unfair to all those who contributed code to the free version. He sees no reason for this behavior and appeals to Sun in his blog.

The Milestone can be downloaded here. The announcement regarding the Development Kit from Sun developer Mark Reinhold gives details on the updates. The final releases of JDK are expected early 2010.

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