[rt-pmc] ALPN and HTTP/2

[Jesse McConnell <jesse.mcconnell@xxxxxxxxx>]

I would like to bring up the topic of distributing modified JDK
classes in our distribution.

HTTP/2 will be releasing VERY soon and we are in a hard place.  It has
long been our understanding that we are not allowed to distribute
modified core java classes as a part of our distribution due to
licensing issues.

https://github.com/jetty-project/jetty-alpn/tree/master/alpn-boot/src/main/java/sun/security/ssl

You can see in the link above the classes that we have had to modify
to add ALPN support into the core openjdk.  ALPN support in the jdk is
a requirement for Java to be able to support HTTP/2 and this can only
be achieved through the use of this library that we maintain outside
of the Eclipse Foundation.  It contains modified openjdk classes and
needs to be added to the bootclasspath when starting up the jvm.

Currently feedback from the openjdk community is that it will not be
until Java 9 that the jdk will have ALPN support, one of our
committers has been invited into that process.

We have support for this in the jetty distribution but it requires the
user to run additional commands and acknowledge they are agreeing to
an additional license and modifying the core jdk classes.

We would like to be able to distribute this in our distribution that
is downloaded from the eclipse.org servers and make it as simple as
possible for people to enable HTTP/2 support in Jetty.  We are at a
competitive disadvantage with other java servers if we force our users
to run additional command lines to download software or heaven forbid
manually download something.  I am not sure about alpn but I know our
npn solution was leveraged directly by other containers and network
stacks to get this functionality and they were able to use it directly
without additional process.

This isn't a traditional 'works with' relationship because we don't
_want_ people to have to separately download things for it to
'magically work'.

Does anyone have an idea on how we can get this type of thing
approved?  Or has there been a shift in policy or thinking that would
let us achieve this with as minimal amount of fuss as possible?

cheers,
Jesse


--
jesse mcconnell
jesse.mcconnell@xxxxxxxxx