/etc/alternatives mess

Fedora insists on not shipping Sun Java because it didn't fall into the open source definition of free. Something that can be downloaded free of charge isn't free. Even if the source code is shipped free of charge, that still doesn't make it a free software. But then sun java changed their license model and by any stretch of the imagination it should now be called free. So Fedora 9 and Debian should both include it by default. Unfortunately debian doesn't. I am not sure if Fedora 9 does; I didn't bother to find out.

Previous versions have also been plagued by the gcj and /etc/alternatives mess. The standard way to configure /etc/alternatives to use the Sun JVM is to say