Stratocaster

Tuesday November 06, 2007

Red Hat's Fine Example

Its a big day for open source Java! Red Hat has signed the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) and the OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement (OCTLA - .pdf), opening the way for their engineers to join the community and contribute. Sounds like a bunch of legal junk, right? Well yes but, it means that Red Hat will ship a compatible implementation of Java SE based on OpenJDK in their distros, using the TCK to test and certify their implementation and bringing "Write Once, Run Anywhere" to their customers and community. When Sun open sourced Java, the company said it wanted to get compatible AND free software implementations into Linux. Well, its working!

This is a major milestone. Red Hat is, of course, a key player in the Linux space. Its a big endorsement for them to join the OpenJDK community under Sun's participation model. Their engineers will be contributing under the SCA, sharing copyright with Sun. When that means folks as knowledgeable and dedicated as Tom and Tom and Andrew and Lillian and Anthony and others we've gotten to know at Red Hat in the past year now have the opportunity to contribute, thats exciting!

Building a community isn't easy, and building a 6.5+ million line code base whose hallmark is compatibility in an open source community is something new to the world. Java technology is on more systems and devices than every other platform - Windows, Linux, Solaris - everything - combined. Java SE runs on most desktop computers in the world, and underlies the stack of server-side middleware that has been so successful in delivering the promise of the Internet to the world. So how does Sun do right by the billions of people benefitting from Java technology while leading the way to opening Java to the FOSS world?

Sun has thought long and hard about what it will take to meet its obligations to customers, licensees, and yes of course, shareholders, while making the communities Sun sponsors as welcoming as possible to a wide range of developers. Open sourcing the code is a start. The participation model is where the action is moving to now.

Matt Asay had this to say:

This is what happens when you get the two biggest open-source companies on the planet. It's what a partnership should look like. It's also a great example of how competitors can compete while still cooperating on baseline technology.

Its great to see Red Hat agreeing that Sun has a model that works for them.

Hopefully other distros will follow suit.