As Rich Sharples announced on his blog this week, the IcedTea Project has completed a major milestone by passing the Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). What all that means is that the IcedTea Project has achieved what Sun promised to do over two years ago at JavaOne: make Java completely open-source.
Red Hat's Fedora 9 will be the first Linux distribution to ship with an OpenJDK binary, and other Linux distributions will probably follow. Some developers, like Fabrizio Giudici, are concerned that the availability of several different distributions that will come with each flavor of Linux will create chaos for developers, suggesting that they will then have to test their code on each distribution.
A lot of Java developers have been in Prague this week for The Server Side Java Symposium - Europe, but based on an informal survey of the developers there, this wasn't considered to be major news. While it means a great deal to the different Linux companies, the developers, for the most part, felt that it would continue to be business as usual. The OpenJDK that Sun released in May of 2007 had only a few sections of code unavailable under the GPL, and for most development projects it wasn't really an impediment.
Of course, if more applications written in Java are open-sourced (like Android), the IcedTea project's work will certainly gain more traction.
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Comments
Cindy, as a professional tech writer, you should do your homework and reserach before you write!
"Red Hat's Fedora 9 will be the first Linux distribution to ship with an OpenJDK binary,"
Ubuntu ist delivering openjdk since April:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=openjdk&searchon=names&suite=...
Besides that, you make no argument for your "does still anyone care" point which suggests the answer "nobody cares" without telling why you think it is.
@henning - but did Ubuntu's openJDK include encumbered code and did it pass the Java TCK ?
@Cindy - I realize you have to get headlines but the "does anyone care" headline was a bit sloppy. My announcement got 50k hits in the first 24 hours, was broadly discussed on Slashdot, JavaZone, Digg, Reddit and a few hundred blogs. So yes people care about Java and they care about finally having an implementation that everyone can feel good about.
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