[OSM-talk] Java and freedom

[David Sheldon]

On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 06:15:31PM +0100, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> On 22 May 2006, at 17:29, David Sheldon wrote:
> 
> >For most people the beer-freeness of Java, and the availability of
> >programming tools is sufficient to make it the tool of choice.
> 
> If only Java really were free as in beer. It'll cost me ?89 to run JOSM 
> on my Mac... because neither Apple nor Sun offer Java 1.5 for OS 10.3 
> (an OS released just two-and-a-half years ago). :(

The problem there isn't the beer-freeness, it is the speach-freeness.
Because you can only get PPC Sun Java for MacOSX 10.4+ you have to pay.
Now if you could get PPC Sun Java for PPC linux, then there would be no
cost, you could run it on Ubuntu on you Mac, if it were free as in
speach you would also be able to recompile it to run on the proprietory
OS that you seem to want to use. 

This is not a beer-freeness issue.  

David
-- 
"DecisionSoft - selling coffee to people on the bandwagon."