Canonical Will Remove Java From Ubuntu

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 12/20/2011 05:48 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Peter Robinson wrote:
>> Actually that's not entirely correct. They're removing the Sun Java
>> closed source variant due to changes in licensing from Oracle
>> preventing them from shipping security fixes. They also ship OpenJDK
>> which is the open source release of the Java JDK as shipped in Fedora
>> and that will continue to be available and its completely compatible
>> with the Sun variant as its mostly based on the same code. I
>> personally think its a good thing.
>>
>> See their press release with the full details
>> https://lwn.net/Articles/472466/
>
> What I don't understand is why they're replacing the packages with empty
> packages rather than just dragging in OpenJDK as an upgrade, which IMHO
> would be much less disruptive.

Probably because OpenJDK and SunJDK aren't really that compatible. I keep 
running into all kinds of software the will not run with the OpenJDK. This 
is one of the reasons why I'm not particularly fond of Java as a Platform.
It was supposed to be "write once run anywhere" but that is not the case in 
practice.
Luckily Oracle will deem OpenJDK the official JDK with the next major 
release so hopefully things will improve with that.

I guess the Ubuntu people decided that making users consciously replace the 
JDK is better then to silently replace it and get all kinds of bug reports 
about java software behaving in strange ways.

Regards,
   Dennis