A frog around the world

For the story, due to license reasons, the version of Java packaged in Linux distributions is not the same as the one released on the official website.
Each time a new version of Java is was released, Sun/Oracle people are were publishing a other distro specific release available on a dedicated website.

Since I have been maintaining sun-java6 packages for a year and half, I am following the rhythm releases (security is one of the reasons).
A few days ago, I pinged on Twitter Dalibor Topic, who is, AFAIK, the person in charge of this at Oracle, he replied with a blog post Retiring the DLJ.

The main information from this blog post is:

[...] further Oracle JDK 6 (or Oracle JDK 7) releases on Linux and Solaris will not be provided under the DLJ [...]

Basically, that means that Linux distributions will not be able to package new releases of the proprietary JVM/JDK (including the latest update -27). The only release available in the Linux distro will be the OpenJDK.

While I am glad to see Oracle pushing the free JDK, I am a bit concern by this sudden decision. There are still bugs (for example, with fonts, applets or other others issues) present in the OpenJDK which does not happen in the sun-java6 packages.
And also, as Andrew John Hughes said on Twitter, the Oracle proprietary JVM just lost one of the two freedoms it had (free to redistribute the software)...

Moreover, many people are still using the proprietary JVM. For example, Debian popularity contest or Ubuntu Popularity Contest reports 836864 installations of sun-java6-jre against 749731 of openjdk-6-jre.

The bottom line is, if you are aware of bugs present only in OpenJDK, please report them (on the Debian bug tracker, launchpad or as a comment of this blog post). We will report them upstream to make sure OpenJDK is as good as sun-java6.

Edit: comments closed due to the spams... Drop me an email on sylvestre@debian.org. I will push them.