As not to contaminate the sticky topic about OpenJDK in German (http://www.stellwerksim.de/forum/viewto ... 21&t=31258) I preferred to open a new topic here.
I want to know the current stance of the developers about OpenJDK and IcedTeaWeb support for Stellwerksim in the future. I am very uncomfortable with the license changes Oracle has made with their JDK (since they also don't bother to provide a light JRE anymore
) from version 11 onwards. In short: for personal use, use of the JDK remains free for personal use at home but companies now have to pay a license royalty to roll out Oracle-branded JDK >v11 in enterprise environments. While using Stellwerksim at home is not an enterprise environment, I now prefer the use of OpenJDK above any Oracle Java version. My gut feeling is that Oracle will probably extend the same license to personal use sometime in the future, and I rather want to be ahead of this.Unfortunately IcedTeaWeb (currently the only open JNLP-implementation) is not compatible with Stellwerksim, and Oracle has already removed support for JNLP/Web Start altogether from Java SE 11 onwards.
IcedTeaWeb used to be a stand-alone project, but now has been brought under the OpenJDK project umbrella as well and they are trying to make it compatible on the feature level of JRE7:
https://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/IcedTea-Web
Another way of supporting OpenJDK would be to revert to the old distribution way when you could download offline versions of Stellwerke in a .jar file. But this time, the .jar file should not contain the Stellwerk itself, but only the launcher application like now the JNLP does (but which only contains a reference to the online version the JRE then first has to download).
I know this will also be a step backwards in regards to offering STS "as a service": with the JNLP functionality, you are always downloading the latest version directly from the server, while the JAR-file launcher will remain static unless you go and download the new version every now and then.
But I really feel the team should take this request seriously and try to estimate how much time it would cost to make STS compatible with OpenJDK. It will also give us even more independence from Oracle, which I now place in the same category as companies like Apple and Adobe (not to be trusted, and not worth receiving my hard-earned money). Even Microsoft is opener these days, providing direct .NET and Powershell Core development and support for all major Linux distributions. Who would have thought it 10 years ago !?
Best regards from Belgium,
btrs