[lsb-discuss] LSB conf call notes for 2008-07-30

Mark Wielaard mark at klomp.org
Mon Aug 11 15:05:20 PDT 2008


Hi Ted,

On Fri, Aug 08, 2008 at 09:30:11AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 03:30:43PM -0400, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> > 
> > My guess is that if it took a significant amount of extra work to get 
> > the Java portions of the tests, we would have to decouple those tests 
> > from the rest of the framework.  If history repeats itself, this would 
> > mean that the tests would never be run in practice until the last 
> > possible moment, and might even result in distros electing not to 
> > certify.  This would be unacceptable from our point of view.
> 
> I could be wrong, but from a legal point of view, I thought the
> trademark agreements were that people aren't allocated to call their
> bag of bits "Java" until they pass the JCK.  Hence, until they certify
> that bag of bits, they could distribute it as "Icedtea", but they
> wouldn't be able to distribute packages that install in /usr/bin/java
> (and which incorporates the name "java" in the package name) until
> they pass the JCK.  Is that correct?

No. command line utility names don't seem to be trademarkable.
Distributions have been distributing /usr/bin/java implementations under
the GPL (gcj, kaffe, classpath) without any need for trademarks.

And passing the ("OpenJDK") JCK doesn't give any trademarks rights.
So, while the binaries of IcedTea as shipped by Fedora (on x86 and x86_64)
pass the TCK the result still cannot be called Java (TM). As far as I know
Sun hasn't published any document or agreement to make this possible
whether or not the implementation passes the TCK.

> Secondly, while I've never run the JCK myself, I seem to recall from
> colleagues of mine that running the JCK can take a full five days to
> complete.  If that is true, I'm not so sure that integrating it into
> the LSB distribution test kit makes a lot of sense....

It isn't days, but certainly many hours. But it can certainly take up
to a whole day because of all the interactive tests that need human
interaction.

Cheers,

Mark



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