Barton's Blog

At last week's Red Hat summit I grabbed Boston local and Sun employee Rich Sands and Toronto-ite/Red Hat employee Tom Fitzsimmons for a podcast.  Rich is the Sun marketing guy for OpenJDK and Tom is one of the key engineers at Red Hat who've been working on IcedTea/OpenJDK.  (Last time I met Tom was at JavaOne where we did this podcast).

The day was a particularly auspicious one for not only was it the day Boston was celebrating the Celtics victory with a humungous parade, but it was also the day it was announced that the OpenJDK in Fedora 9 passed the Java TCK.

My interview with Tom and Rich (13:25)  Listen (Mp3) Listen (ogg)

Rich Sands of Sun (left) and Tom Fitzsimmons of Red Hat (funny thing is Tom is only 5'8") 

Some of the topics we tackle:

• The people who make up the Red Hat/Fedora Iced Tea team.
• The significance of passing the TCK and what a milestone achievement it is
• Tom as the demo-dude floor demonstrating OpenJDK in Fedora on the show floor and the reactions he's been getting.
• What's coming for Fedora 10
• What about the Java plugin and Webstart from Sun and the implementations of these that Fedora has created
• JRuby and Jython running on OpenJDK in Fedora