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Tuesday November 06, 2007

Red Hat and OpenJDK

I'm sure you've seen the news that Red Hat has signed the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) and the OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement (OCTLA). My coworkers webmink, barton808, mr and rsands have already blogged about it!

It's important to realize that IcedTea is intended as a temporary project until the remaining closed bits of OpenJDK have been removed. The best explanation of comes from Andrew Haley (aph) when he introduced IcedTea.

• Being available on all architectures supported by the distribution
• Debugger support so that, for example, it is possible to step from C++ code into Java code and back again.
• Profiler support for mixed source programs... possibly even with kernel profiling (with oprofile)
• Being installable as a valid build dependency for Java library and application developers

• GNU/Linux applications based on Java could have a substantial percentage of code which is architecture independent. This would reduce the number of packages and size of the distributor's archive (because a *.jar file should run anywhere -- you package it one time for all architectures). It would also reduce time to build a new OS release for each architecture.
• OS developers could write administrative utilities (at least partially) in Java instead of C and thus benefit from a rich set of libraries while avoiding the pitfalls of pointer manipulation
• The pluggable look and feel framework of Java could help GNU/Linux get beyond the widget/desktop differences (Gnome, KDE, Xcfe) so that Java applications always look well integrated.
• Developing GUI administration tools for GNU/Linux could improve the "ease of use" barrier for a new class of GNU/Linux users.

• There is now an OpenJDK Porters group proposal to facilitate porting to new architectures (and other operating systems). Many developers have contacted me about porting OpenJDK to new combinations of operating systems + chip architectures.
• Adding debugging and profiling capability to the HotSpot virtual machine is complex precisely because the methods are dynamically compiled, but we can leverage the technology in the NetBeans profiler -- recently available under the GPL.
• As OpenJDK expands our infrastructure it will be easier to collaborate with the community on open source replacements for the remaining encumbrances. Consequently the 100% open source OpenJDK would be a candidate for inclusion in the main repository of Free Software GNU/Linux distributions.

(A big grazie to neugens for enhancing my flickr photo!)

Friday September 28, 2007

Clearing Encumbrances

As you know we have some encumbrances with OpenJDK. There has been some confusion about this so let me restate that Sun has released all the source code for OpenJDK under the GPL that we can. As a result we make some binary plugs available so that you can build OpenJDK.

Nevertheless it is our hope to get to 100% Free and 100% Java Compatible as soon as possible.

I'd like to give you a brief update on progress on our OpenJDK projects to clear the outstanding encumbrances.

Friday July 27, 2007

FLOSS week
A week ago I was in Menlo Park to tape a SDN-TV segment with Kuldip on OpenJDK. Then starting on Sunday I was with our team in Portland at the UbuntuLive conference and gave a presentation.

In the segue from UbuntuLive to OSCON I was able to attend a meeting of open source community leaders to discuss, among other things, trademark law and open source projects. We also had Tiki Dare, Sun's trademark counsel, and Simon Phipps, director of Free Software, representing Sun. This was a fantastic session that highights the need to collaborate on this third element of law surrounding software projects. There was general consensus that sharing "case studies" would be a fantastic first step.