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NOTE: there's an ongoing discussion on debian-devel and debian-legal about license issues. It appears the new licnese was not (publicly) discussed prior to upload and (suspiciously speedy) acceptance. It also appears to a number of people that Debian is not actually able to legally redistribute it. (And, folks, the FAQ is irrelevant: the only thing that has any worth in a court of law is the actual license text (and the FAQ itself says so, too))

Why is Sun's implementation of Java not included in Debian?

Please refer to the [http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-java-faq/ch5.html#s-license-concerns Java Licensing FAQ]

What is the status of getting a Sun Java implementation into Debian?

It was recently [http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2006-05/sunflash.20060516.4.xml announced] by [http://sun.com Sun] that Sun was changing the license by which Java may be redistributed:

...Developed in consultation with, and for use by, the various GNU/Linux communities, the new license allows distributors to ship Sun's Java SE 5.0 Java Development Kit (JDK) and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) as installable packages for their operating systems....

As a result, Debian is now able to legally redistribute Sun ["?JavaVirtualMachine"]s and ["?JavaRuntimeEnvironment"]s in the ?NonFree section, as was [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/05/msg00010.html announced here].

NOTE: there's an ongoing discussion on debian-devel and debian-legal about license issues. It appears the new licnese was not (publicly) discussed prior to upload and (suspiciously speedy) acceptance. It also appears to a number of people that Debian is not actually able to legally redistribute it. (And, folks, the FAQ is irrelevant: the only thing that has any worth in a court of law is the actual license text (and the FAQ itself says so, too))

NOTE: Sun has not yet released their implemntation of Java under an OpenSource license, however, allegedly [1] they may sometime in the future. As such, Sun's implementation of Java does not conform to the DebianFreeSoftwareGuidelines, and therefore cannot be included in Debian.

[1] http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9593_22-6072760.html

When will Sun's Java be available for Etch?

See: [http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/testing.pl?package=sun-java5 Why is sun-java5 not in testing]

How do I install Sun's non-free Java implementation in DebianUnstable?

You must have ?NonFree in your sources.list, then install the sun-java5-jre package or the sun-java5-jdk package.

How do I install Sun's non-free Java implementation in DebianStable or DebianTesting?

Use JavaPackage.

See Also