Java finally open-sourced. Does anyone still care?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:57:03 -0700

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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Java finally open-sourced. Does anyone still care?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:57:03 -0700

Of course, if more applications written in Java are open-sourced (like Android), the IcedTea project's work will certainly gain more traction.

More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:

Analysis: .Net, Java tops with wireless app builders
News: JBoss joins Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2
News: Open-source batch framework debuts