Open Source Weblog

All of this is good news for Red Hat customers, good news for Java, and good news for Sun. For Red Hat customers, it means Red Hat is on its way to creating an open source Java Development Kit for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat said it is also likely to enable tighter alignment of its IcedTea project it kicked off earlier in the year, with the goal of bringing together Fedora and JBoss.org technologies in a Linux environment. “IcedTea provides Free Software alternatives for the few remaining proprietary sections in the OpenJDK project,” noted Red Hat.

Sun, and the Java ecosystem, will benefit from this because Red Hat will share its developers' contributions with Sun as part of the OpenJDK community. There may be a little direct revenue in it for Sun too, because Red Hat is the first major software vendor to license the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK), which Red Hat can use to check that whatever it comes up with is compatible with Java SE.

Sun’s Simon Phipps was certainly upbeat about the news, but also said, “I hope we'll see IcedTea become an OpenJDK project as a result of this - the Classpath folk have been doing an awesome job.”

The only question really is why it took Red Hat so long to make this move. As The451 Group’s Raven Zachary noted, until now Red Hat has been a little coy about fully backing Java, choosing instead to work with BEA Systems on JRockit for optimisation on Linux.

What’s changed of course is the open sourcing of Java, which has made it simpler for Red Hat to use it in its Linux distribution and related tools, Zachary said. The question remains though, what took them? Sun officially open sourced Java a year ago.

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