This is because attempting a wget is redirecting you to an HTML page, presumably demanding you accept their terms and conditions first. Running your wget command reveals this:
--2013-10-14 18:16:42-- http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u1-b08/jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm
Resolving download.oracle.com... 23.62.239.25, 23.62.239.8
Connecting to download.oracle.com|23.62.239.25|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: https://edelivery.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u1-b08/jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm [following]
--2013-10-14 18:16:43-- https://edelivery.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u1-b08/jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm
Resolving edelivery.oracle.com... 23.65.6.140
Connecting to edelivery.oracle.com|23.65.6.140|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: http://download.oracle.com/errors/download-fail-1505220.html [following]
--2013-10-14 18:16:45-- http://download.oracle.com/errors/download-fail-1505220.html
Connecting to download.oracle.com|23.62.239.25|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 5307 (5.2K) [text/html]
Saving to: ‘jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm’
The important line is right here:
Length: 5307 (5.2K) [text/html]
Looking at the README.md in the OpsCode java cookbook reveals the following:
IMPORTANT NOTE
As of 26 March 2012 you can no longer directly download the JDK from Oracle's
website without using a special cookie. This cookbook uses that cookie to
download the oracle recipe on your behalf <snipped>
But then looking in the oracle.rb recipe, you can see the following:
if tarball_url =~ /example.com/
Chef::Application.fatal!("You must change the download link to your private repository. You can no longer download java directly from http://download.oracle.com without a web broswer")
end
This means that you need to install via apt/yum/whatever from a repository that has the latest JDK 7 package, or head over to the OpenJDK project and download from there.