IcedTea and integration of applet, webstart, javascript/rhino, visualvm, etc.

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Geir,

On Sat, 2008-09-13 at 16:54 -0400, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> Do you give patches back to OpenJDK?  How do you deal with the joint  
> copyright thing?  I looked at the site but didn't see anything.

We encourage people to submit patches also to the various upstream
projects we use to keep divergence to a minimum when possible. IcedTea
itself doesn't have any joint copyright thing.

> That's great!  I'm just curious why it couldn't have been done in the  
> OpenJDK project.

I think you can see IcedTea as a sister project of OpenJDK that shares
most of the code and goals, whether that means it is in or out I'll
leave to the philosophers, but it seems to me to be no more out than,
say, Sun's ClosedJDK. It is just another repository and group of people
most of which have some overlap with other projects and repositories.
They are just a little obsessed with this Freedom thingy, GNU/Linux
distros, integration with existing libre java communities and providing
a complete user experience out of the box.

Most of the current structure just grew organically and comes from
historical accidents. There were mailinglists at openjdk.java.net from
the start, so that is where the discussions are. There wasn't a
mercurial repo setup yet, so we asked Jim if we could get a machine and
set one up, there still isn't an open bug database, so we have a
bugzilla instance now, etc. Slowly some of these things are merging, for
others the current setup is just convenient now for people to work in so
we keep them as it is.

Cheers,

Mark