[gentoo-java] Building an open source NetBeans

["Nico R." <n-roeser@gmx.net>]

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Hi, fellow hackers,

I’d like to build and run NetBeans on a Gentoo box, but without
installing any packages which are binary-only, fetch-restricted and
where I have to accept that I may not reverse-engineer them, etc.

For dev-java/netbeans-6.5-r4 and dev-java/netbeans-6.7.1, this seems to
work fine (but I have only checked the ‘emerge --pretend’ output so far).

Slots 6.8 and 6.9 have a dependency on dev-java/jnlp-bin-1.2-r1, which
is fetch-restricted and shows discriminating license terms before you
can download it (but is marked as licensed under the MPL). The other
problematic package, dev-java/jsr67, can be replaced with a package
built from source, I assume. See bug 360255
<URL:https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360255>.

Slot 6.9 depends on dev-java/jta:0, which is licensed under the
‘sun-bcla-jta’ license. I’d like to replace this package with an open
source alternative as well.

It seems to me that NetBeans is not as free and open source as
Sun/Oracle always says… :-p

Using NetBeans 6.7 is not that great of a workaround, as we are already
at 7.0. If there is interest in this, I’d like to try to spend some time
in getting NetBeans built and running on Gentoo without ugly license
terms and such.

I don’t claim to know the NetBeans code or infrastructure well, so some
pointers would be appreciated. Is anyone working on anything like this
at the moment? Or does anybody have some hints where/how to start?

Thanks!

By the way, I’d be happy to meet some of you at LinuxTag 2011 in Berlin
(starting tomorrow). I’ll make sure to pay the Gentoo booth a visit.
Anyone who’s attending? Or who still needs a ticket? ;-)
-- 
Nico


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