JFX on iOS - legal barriers to community doing the work? (original) (raw)

Mario Torre neugens.limasoftware at gmail.com
Thu Oct 25 01:05:55 PDT 2012

2012/10/25 Daniel Zwolenski <zonski at gmail.com>:

I think the "official" stance regarding JFX on iOS is that the community will build it once everything is open source?

I assume this will mean someone porting "OpenJDK+OpenJFX" to the iOS platform? According to everything I can find on the web, GPL is not legally allowed in the iOS app store because the two licences clash. As I understand it both OpenJDK and OpenJFX are distributed under the GPL licence. Doesn't that mean if the community did this port, no one would be legally allowed to deploy it to the app store anyway?

IANAL, but as far as I understand, yes, you are right.

However, if you contribute back this code Oracle can.

Depending on how Oracle want to play steward in this process, once this port is contributed back (remember that you signed the OCA in this case), Oracle could still ship a version of JavaFX/OpenJDK on iOS that is not GPL. This is, of course, less than ideal. This is already the case for every GPL application and library, so I think a better way would be for the companies involved (especially Oracle, which has a good weight), to try to push Apple to change this stupid policy, but this is entirely Apple fault, and the reason why iOS is so crippled.

I would also love to hear what Oracle thinks on the matter (since this is likely a stopper for them too).

Cheers, Mario

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