The first morning of JavaOne was a great serendipitous event. How often does something fall into place like this: I saw Barton George, who looks after Sun’s relationships with Linux communities, and we decided to cook up a podcast about OpenJDK 6 in Fedora 9. As we walked to the recording room, I commented that it would be great if we could get Tom Fitzsimmons, too. Not two beats later, we rounded a corner, and there stood Tom with Patrick Macdonald. Of course they were available and happy to record with us, and away we went.

Hear Barton (and a little bit of me) interview Tom and Patrick about the journey of OpenJDK and IcedTea: OGG and MP3


Patrick Macdonald, Tom Fitzsimmons (kneeling), and Karsten Wade. Photo: Barton George from this post


The discussion covered the history of making a 100% free and open source runtime in Fedora from the initial Java open source code, which itself was 96% of a complete and self-building JDK. This remaining 4% was filled with components from GNU Classpath by the IcedTea team. The term “IcedTea” came from the package name used because, at that time, Fedora didn’t have a trademark license to use “OpenJDK”. Of the GNU Classpath code used, some if it ended up completing the circle to be included in OpenJDK. Based on relationships made at FOSDEM 2007, the team from Fedora/Red Hat were able to work with folks from Sun and other places to do work in the community in advance of resolving the remaining 4%, and do it in a way that could be more easily folded into OpenJDK.

What is riveting about this story is the speed and quality of the outcome that is clearly due to the open source methodology used. By opening all the code that they could, Sun made it possible for others to fill the gaps Sun could not immediately fill. By working closely throughout that process, all of the open source code was used and tested in the community. Sun had time to choose the right license so the code could be merged. If Sun had waited until they could open all the code, we would have lost an entire year of development (at least.)

Now that OpenJDK 6 is available in EPEL 5 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, it is only a matter of time before it gets certified to appear in an update. This is being worked on by Keith Seitz and Mark Wielaard, who have “not many” test suites to complete to be ready to pass the TCK. Once that is done, the implementation can be called “Java compliant”, which is an important step to being ready for an Enterprise Linux 5.x update.

Listen to the audio to get all the details, and check out Barton’s blog entry for his viewpoint.




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