I'm wondering what the strategy is regarding the existing stack vs the Sun stack now that it's under a Fedora compatible license. Will the two initiatives merge sometime in the future? I'm sure this has been discussed to death in other forums, but can someone who is familiar with what's going on summarize?
Thanks, Joe
Hi Joe,
I'm wondering what the strategy is regarding the existing stack vs the Sun stack now that it's under a Fedora compatible license. Will the two initiatives merge sometime in the future? I'm sure this has been discussed to death in other forums, but can someone who is familiar with what's going on summarize?
Unfortunately, the Sun implementation of Java is not 100% free: some encumbered areas remain which were released as binary-only plugs.
The IcedTea project (http://icedtea.classpath.org or http://iced-tea.org) attempts to use the GNU Classpath project to replace these areas and create a 100% free Java implementation based on Sun's OpenJDK, and we plan on having this in Fedora.
One problem thus far have been some licensing problems with Sun's OpenJDK: a handful of files do not have proper license headers, and while we suspect this was merely an oversight, they have not been fixed yet and are a barrier to Fedora inclusion. We are hoping to have this resolved before Fedora 8.
Cheers, Francis
Joe Desbonnet writes:
I'm wondering what the strategy is regarding the existing stack vs the Sun stack now that it's under a Fedora compatible license. Will the two initiatives merge sometime in the future? I'm sure this has been discussed to death in other forums, but can someone who is familiar with what's going on summarize?
Top level: we don't yet know.
Hopefully we'll soon be shipping Sun's Java or a package derived from it. However, it only runs on a couple of the architectures supported by GNU/Linux, and while we are working on porting it to other architectures, it'll be a while yet.
There are people who would like to see gcj contine, myself included. We've recently upgraded gcj to Java 1.5 status.
We'll be supporting both in Fedora for the medium term.
Andrew.
java-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org