The release of Java update 29 from Oracle marks not only security updates,
but a change to the licensing, removing Debian's ability to distribute the
non-free JVM. The clause in the Java license under which we were able to
distribute Java, the
DLJ,
has been removed. As a result, the sun-java6 package is no longer suitable
for the archive, and has been removed, as documented in
Debian Bug #646524. Sylvestre Ledru
suggests
that sun-java6 installs be migrated to openjdk, the open-source alternative, using the
following command:
apt-get --purge remove sun-java6-jre && apt-get install openjdk-7-jre.
Kai Wasserbäch has also been pointed out
elsewhere
that this upgrade path might not be suitable for all Java programs, and special
attention should be paid to re-testing installed Java applications on OpenJDK.