Sun JDK vs OpenJDK - Sun JRE vs OpenJDK JRE

Geir Magnusson Jr. geir at pobox.com
Sat Sep 13 21:04:09 UTC 2008


On Sep 13, 2008, at 4:21 PM, Dalibor Topic wrote:

> Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
>> Why not do continuing maintenance of j6 in the open and push the code
>> into the secret j6 repo and the JDK Next repo?
> Because OpenJDK 6 came after OpenJDK 7 which came after SE 6.

Remember that 3 card monty thing? :)

How could ....  oh, never mind.

>
>
> OpenJDK 7 is where the development of 7 is happening, while OpenJDK 6
> has been created to deliver a stable, certifiable
> implementation of SE 6 in collaboration with GNU/Linux  
> distributions, as
> it makes a lot more sense for a distributor to ship
> a stable SE 6 API and implementation then one in heavy development,  
> i.e.
> 7, and a lot of distributors have a strong preference
> for a fully free software implementation, i.e. OpenJDK 6 based ones.

But "Java 7" was the Java 6 code, right?  why would 6 come after 7?

>
>
> Yeah, it's a bit messier than one would expect, but it should become
> simpler over time.
>
>> Why not just get people to bring changes directly to the project?
> They do, too. One does not exclude the other. ;)
>>  And how do contributions happen?
> On the lists.

iced-tea lists?

>
>> I know sun wants joint copyright of everything - is icedtea securing
>> copyright for transfer to Sun?
> The patches going into OpenJDK are covered by SCA, yes. Not all  
> patches
> need to go into OpenJDK, though,
> so IcedTea does not require the SCA for contributions.

So what happens when something in IcedTea needs to go back into  
OpenJDK?  Has that actually happened?

>
>> Doesn't this take the pressure off sun to build a community?
> The OpenJDK community goes beyond a single organization or project.
> Naturally, Sun is contributing a lot
> to help grow OpenJDK, and so far seems to be doing it all a lot better
> then some would have expected initially.
>
> That's in large part due to the community OpenJDK attracted so far
> coming from a long tradition of successful,
> distributed open source development around independent projects like  
> GNU
> Classpath - those developers
> don't have a habit of waiting for Sun to do one thing or another - as
> IcedTea shows, the community goes
> ahead and does things that it needs to be done, like pull up  
> additional
> ports, or provide a plugin on
> amd64-linux, etc.
>

But then if they're doing it "over there", how does that make them  
part of the community "over here"?

I'm really not trying to be argumentative :)  I'm just trying to grok  
what is real and what is "promotion".

> I think it's been working out pretty good overall - instead of the  
> team
> at Sun trying to build an
> open source Java SE community from scratch, it was courageous enough  
> to
> try to mesh with the
> existing one instead, and that has paid off.

Oh, come now :)  They are meshing with part of the OSS Java SE  
community one one hand,  and - forgive me for being blunt - using  
patent-based licensing restrictions to try to strangle (or, as MSFT  
would phrase it, "cut off the air supply" ) another.

I'm glad it's paying off for you.  Is there a certified, non-sun java  
se impl yet?

geir




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