Canonical announced a few days ago, December 15th, that it will remove all Sun JDK (Java Development Kit) packages from the Canonical Partner repository.

Because Oracle retired the “Operating System Distributor License for Java”, Canonical no longer has permission to redistribute new Java packages.

Therefore, in the near future, Canonical will push empty packages to the repositories, removing Sun JDK from user’s machines through the usual update process.

Canonical also suggest that all users have to migrate to OpenJDK as soon as possible, in order to avoid system failures. Installing icedtea6-plugin for the web browser, and openjdk-6-jdk or openjdk-6-jre for the virtual machine will solve the problem.

“Due to the severity of the security risk, Canonical is immediately releasing a security update for the Sun JDK browser plugin which will disable the plugin on all machines. This will mitigate users’ risk from malicious websites exploiting the vulnerable version of the Sun JDK.” – said Marc Deslauriers from Canonical

Important notice regarding Java packages in Partner archive

Marc Deslauriersmarc.deslauriers at canonical.com
Thu Dec 15 19:28:10 UTC 2011

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The Canonical partner archive currently contains Oracle's Sun Java JDK
packages (sun-java6) for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04.

As of August 24th 2011, we no longer have permission to redistribute new
Java packages as Oracle has retired the “Operating System Distributor
License for Java” [1][2].

Oracle has published an advisory about security issues in the version of
Java we currently have in the partner archive [3]. Some of these issues are
currently being exploited in the wild.

Due to the severity of the security risk, Canonical is immediately
releasing a security update for the Sun JDK browser plugin which will
disable the plugin on all machines. This will mitigate users' risk from
malicious websites exploiting the vulnerable version of the Sun JDK.

In the near future (exact date TBD), Canonical will remove all Sun JDK
packages from the Partner archive. This will be accomplished by pushing
empty packages to the archive, so that the Sun JDK will be removed from all
users machines when they do a software update. Users of these packages who
have not migrated to an alternative solution will experience failures after
the package updates have removed Oracle Java from the system.

If you are currently using the Oracle Java packages from the partner
archive, you have two options:

1- Install the OpenJDK packages that are provided in the main Ubuntu
   archive. (icedtea6-plugin for the browser plugin, openjdk-6-jdk or
   openjdk-6-jre for the virtual machine)
2- Manually install Oracle's Java software from their web site [4].

For more information, please consult the wiki page on the subject [5].

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and thank you for your
understanding.

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