IBM joins Oracle for OpenJDK work [LWN.net]

IBM joins Oracle for OpenJDK work

Posted Oct 12, 2010 8:40 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: IBM joins Oracle for OpenJDK work by tajyrink
Parent article: IBM joins Oracle for OpenJDK work

I don't think there is a lot of disconnect between IcedTea and OpenJDK those days. OpenJDK is slowly integrating IcedTea changes, and IcedTea is quickly rebased over new OpenJDK releases when they happen (hell, even Red Hat does not call its java package icedtea anymore, it's openjdk now, even though it's actually an icedtea-ed openjdk).

The big news here is that IBM is dropping Harmony as its open-source Java target and switching to OpenJDK. In SUN times, IBM had resisted supporting OpenJDK, backing Harmony, and trying this way to force an OpenJDK licence change away from copyleft-ish GPLish licensing. I guess they've realised Oracle was too strong to get its hand forced this way, and that they could live with GPL+CE.

to post comments

IcedTea

Posted Oct 12, 2010 9:49 UTC (Tue) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

There is indeed a close working relationship between IcedTea and OpenJDK. And IcedTea has always promoted itself as not being an actual fork of OpenJDK, just a way for hackers to work together without any legal/political/technical constraints.

http://icedtea.classpath.org/ closely tracks OpenJDK, makes sure the code base can be bootstrapped with a free toolchain (GCC/GCJ/GNU Classpath), has a framework to make it possible for people to package things in GNU/Linux distributions, plugs some small holes in OpenJDK, so one can be sure to not need any proprietary blobs still left in OpenJDK/ClosedJDK, integrates with other free software projects like Cacao, VisualVM, Rhino, etc. Is a testing ground of portability of HotSpot through Zero and Shark. And adds missing pieces like Java Web Start (JNLP) and a browser plugin (Applet) support. For those that wish to sign the SCA code is contributed to OpenJDK (if existing code licenses allow assigning all rights to Oracle of course).