"JOSM and Java" on German forum

[Jo]

Hi Vincent,

Thanks for that very succinct description of what is going on!

Polyglot

On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 10:40 PM Vincent Privat <vincent.privat at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello,
> Today's weeklyOSM speaks about this German thread:
> https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=65470
>
> I read a lot of incorrect statements there so I twitted some detailed
> explanations here:
> https://twitter.com/josmeditor/status/1125135390426505218
>
> Can someone speaking German share the link there? Find below the copy/paste
> of my tweets:
>
> ----
> Many incorrect statements about the new @Java license from @Oracle on the
> German @openstreetmap forum (
> https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=65470) mentioned in
> @weeklyOSM. Let's see in detail what all is this about. #Thread
> #openstreetmap #java ⬇️
> First of all, a little bit of history/terminology. Java was created in 1995
> by Sun. We call "Java" both the programming language and the platform that
> runs JOSM (JRE = Java Runtime Environment). Several platforms, from
> multiple vendors, exist.
> The JDK (Java Development Kit) contains the JRE but also developer tools
> (mainly, the java compiler). In 2006, around the release of Java 6, Sun
> announced its intention to open-source Java in a new project: @OpenJDK.
> OpenJDK is badly named, like OpenStreetMap. We don't only map streets...
> Well OpenJDK project does not only concern the JDK but the whole Java
> platform (language, spec, tools, APIs, etc.). @speakjava explains it nicely
> at https://www.azul.com/how-do-we-define-java/
> Sun open sourced many things from Java into the OpenJDK project, but not
> all things. In particular, Windows/Mac installers and deployment
> technologies like #WebStart were not open sourced (we don't know why).
> It means OpenJDK is only a "source code" project. Building it is very
> complex, and nobody took the pain to distribute free binaries for Windows &
> Mac. Only @RedHat did it for Linux in the IcedTea project. If you have 100%
> free Java on Linux, it's thank to them.
> In 2009 Oracle bought Sun. They didn't change things radically until
> recently. So even today most of Windows and Mac users are still using
> proprietary JRE binaries from Oracle, that are built upon open source
> project OpenJDK.
> Oracle made a very good job in releasing Java 8 in 2014, then Java 9 in
> 2017. We even collaborated with them in mutual good faith. Then, all hell
> broke loose.
> They changed the Java release cycle to to a fixed 6 months schedule (2
> versions per year). We are now at Java 12 (which is by the way the most
> unimpressive version of Java: nothing new in it).
> They changed the licence of the Oracle JDK: basically if you are an
> enterprise and want to use Oracle binaries, you have to pay.
> They introduced the notion of Long Term Support versions (LTS). Java 8 is
> an LTS, Java 11 too. For more details about "release train" and licencing,
> see the excellent blog post by @hendrikEbbers:
> https://dev.karakun.com/java/2018/06/25/java-releases.html
> And concerning the Java 8 binaries that almost everyone uses on Windows and
> Mac, they changed the licence to a free "for personal desktop use, through
> at least the end of 2020":
> https://www.java.com/en/download/faq/distribution.xml
> These changes came from nowhere and the Java community was not prepared for
> it. So it required some time until we can get to a free replacement to the
> Oracle binaries on Windows and Mac, and that's why we didn't advise anyone
> to switch to something else yet.
> But we're almost there thanks to @adoptopenjdk! This community-based
> project offers free downloads of OpenJDK on all platforms!
> https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html
> We're just waiting for the availability of a few enhancements of the
> AdoptOpenJDK installer before advising everyone to switch.
> 1) The inclusion of JavaFX (another technology abandoned by Oracle and now
> maintained by @GluonHQ), which is used by JOSM to play MP3 files, and by
> some plugins like Microsoft StreetSide:
> https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk-build/issues/577
> 2) The inclusion of IcedTea-Web (the free implementation of Java #WebStart
> which has also been abandoned by Oracle):
> https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk-build/issues/898 We can thank
> @RedHat (again) for this project, plus also @karakun and @adoptopenjdk for
> their work
> 3) An auto-update feature to make sure everyone can automatically get
> security updates:
> https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk-installer/issues/4
> Once all these issues are resolved (hopefully long before end of 2020)
> we'll ask everyone to switch to AdoptOpenJDK. Until now, even if we despise
> Oracle for all of this, we still advise to keep the current Oracle JRE, at
> least for the automatic security updates.
> This is also why we still target Java 8 as a minimum. Once everyone is able
> to run JOSM using AdopOpenJDK binaries, we'll likely switch to Java 11!
> Which is by the way now maintained by @RedHat and not by Oracle :)
> ----
>
> Cheers,
> Vincent
>