The license change took away the license for OSes (e.g. linux distributions) to distribute the Oracle JDK (which includes the Java Runtime Environment) as part of their distribution.<p>This means linux distributions can no longer supply the official Oracle JDK as "native" packages. It is still available for free (monetarily), but only as a direct download from the Oracle site.<p>The IcedTea Wikipedia entry <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IcedTea#History" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IcedTea#History</a> has a summary list of what proprietary binary bits are in the Oracle JDK. It has a footnote reference to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Class_Library#Licensing" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Class_Library#Licensing</a> which is more definitive.<p>Impact?<p>* Ubuntu (and, I presume, all the others) has already deprecated or removed the Oracle JDK, thus little or no impact.<p>* The Oracle JDK is still available, so from that POV it has little impact. <i>However,</i> the Oracle JDK is now outside the distribution packaging system, so if you download the Oracle JDK and then try to install a package that depends on having a JDK/JRE, the packaging system (e.g. apt/yum) will not know that you have the Oracle JDK installed and will install OpenJDK. This will result in confusion and conflicts (at least, it did for me ;-).<p>* Oracle says it is moving to being based on the OpenJDK itself, so the dichotomy should resolve itself. <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/community/opensourcejdk-jsp-136417.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/community/open...</a><p>"Oracle's commercial JDK releases will be built from the open-source code, for the most part. Since there's some encumbered code in the JDK, Oracle will continue to use that code in commercial releases until it is replaced by fully-functional open-source alternatives. To learn more about development and deployment support options, visit the Java Support site."<p>* Licensees of Oracle SE will still be able to distribute the Oracle JDK: <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/overview/licensees-jsp-136136.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/overview/licen...</a>