Exciting news today for the OpenJDK community as you can see from this Red Hat announcement. A few key points on this news:
- Red Hat has signed the Sun Contributor Agreement, which gives all Red Hat engineers the opportunity to participate in OpenJDK, as well as the other Sun-sponsored open source communities.
- Red Hat is also the 1st major software vendor to sign the OpenJDK TCK license, which was announced earlier this year. This means that Red Hat can test its OpenJDK implementations, based on code released under the GPL in the OpenJDK community, and validate that their implementations are compatible with the Java SE platform.
- As a contributor, Red Hat will have the ability to contribute
their own changes and fixes upstream into the OpenJDK code base, as
well as access to the Java SE 6 TCK, enabling them to eventually
deliver a JRE for Red Hat Enterprise Linux that would significantly
enhance Java software applications.
Obviously, the OpenJDK team at Sun is delighted by this news &
looking forward to collaborating more closely w/ Red Hat engineers.
See what Simon
Phipps, Mark
Reinhold & Barton
George have to say about this news.
And, it's great to see the JBoss team @ Red Hat is excited about this announcement as well.
Update: Rich Sands offers some commentary as well.
Update #2: Tom Marble's got a new post with a cool Duke graphic.