Re: Licensing questions

Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>>
>> Dominic, do you know if RedHat was distributing Blackdown before the 
>> IBM JRE/SDK became available?
> 
> 
> I've been using Red Hat since 1996.  I do not recall Red Hat ever 
> shipping Blackdown.
> 

Same here.

>> Also do you know if did they have to obtain a commercial distribution 
>> license with either IBM and/or Sun?
> 
> 
> Red Hat ships IBM's JRE/SDK only with their "Enterprise" product line, 
> AFAIK, which costs a few grand per seat.

How uninformed. RHEL/ES starts at $349, while WS is $179. If you have a beef 
with RedHat, that's ok, each to his own, but have the decency to actually check 
out the facts. I for one am really, really pissed of about how Sun's doing Linux 
business and their bashing on RedHat, but I'm not randomly quoting pricing for 
the servers they sell.

RedHat also provides JRockit on the EL line.

> 
> So, yeah, there's a license in there somewhere.  Almost a certainty.  
> But only from IBM.  I can't think of any reason why Red Hat would need a 
> Sun license. AFAIK, IBM's JRE/SDK is not derived from Sun's codebase.
> 

I think it most likely is. There's (c) to Sun 1992,2003 and IBM 1998,2004 in the 
"copyright" file. Also it starts with "Licensed material - property of IBM". 
IANAL so I'm not sure how to read the above.

Regards,
-- 
Radu-Adrian Popescu
CSA, DBA, Developer
Aldrapay MD
Aldratech Ltd.
+40213212243