Ok, it’s relatively easy.

I first downloaded the current .jar file from https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ (josm-tested.jar v.8339 in my case) This I saved to a suitable subdir beneath my user directory ($HOME/bin/josm)

Then I created a little shell script in the same directory (named josm.sh) with the following content:

!/bin/bash

java -jar $HOME/bin/josm/josm-tested.8339.jar

This will start java with the josm application. To be runable, it also has to be set as executable: chmod a+x josm.sh

This script can now already be used to start josm from the command line $HOME/bin/josm/josm.sh

For convenience I also added an entry to my K-Desktop Starter-Menu (right click on the “K”- edit menu items or similar), that points to the josm.sh script. I don’t know how this last step is done with Ubuntu’s Unity desktop though…

I see the same here with my Kubuntu 14.04.

The JOSM version in the repos is rather old, so probably stumbles over some Bing-API change that took place since the LTS release.

As the rest seems to be working fine, I decided to live with it and stay with the version from the original repo.

On the other hand, as JOSM is a java application it may be easy to install it in parallel in the user’s directory. Perhaps I will try that and report here.