"Why isn't shipping the runtime with the code a more common practise?" I'd say it is a pretty common thing. I can't tell you why it isn't the norm nowadays but

"Why isn't shipping the runtime with the code a more common practise?" I'd say it is a pretty common thing. I can't tell you why it isn't the norm nowadays but it used to be that Sun and Oracle prohibited modifications to the JRE in their license. So you had ship the whole bloated thing or nothing to be compliant, even if it was technically not too hard to strip the JRE down to only the things your app needed.