Found OpenJDK 6 windows build at www.openscg.com/se/

[Mark Wielaard]

On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 21:49 -0300, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 7:33 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes
> <gnu_andrew at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> 
> > Our Free plugin and Web Start implementation have now been split out
> > into the icedtea-web project which should see its first independent
> > release soon.  We'd certainly be interested in seeing this ported to
> > other platforms.
>
> Why not make it part of OpenJDK, so the user only has to install
> openJDK to get a fully functional java installation ? (both JRE and
> browser plug-in and Java Web Start) ??.

Having independent parts in independent repositories does help with
parallel development sometimes. It isn't much different from having
separate hg trees in a forest. Of course if you want to provide a full
free java implementation you have to combine them for your users.
Everybody is free to do that when they create a distribution, and that
is what the GNU/Linux distos do for their icedtea/openjdk packages. That
way users have a free java with everything included. It is all under the
GPL of course (the plugin and webstart code are derived from various
existing free software projects) so if Oracle wishes they could also
include it in the main OpenJDK repository. But they seem to resist
including code for which they cannot get full rights through SCA
assignment.

Note that earlier Sun promised to release their implementation as Free
Software also, but they never did, which is why we have alternative free
implementations now:
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk6-dev/2009-June/000607.html

> Why confuse the users with yet-another-package name? What´s the
> rationale for "splitting" the plug-in into "Icedtea" which AFAIK is
> redundant and useless in spite of the availability of OpenJDK?.

See http://icedtea.classpath.org/ for the why and what it provides. In
most cases people will just call the IcedTea distro OpenJDK in their
packages (there are some trademark rules of when you may use the OpenJDK
name, but Mark Reinhold provided a patch that should make IcedTea do the
right thing in most cases based on how it is configured). Basically it
is just a place where people can collaborate around the code if they
feel for whatever reason (political, legal, convenience) it cannot (yet)
be included in OpenJDK. Since Oracle insists of being granted full
rights to all the code contributed to OpenJDK, people can use IcedTea to
get things done while such issues are being dealt with if they wish. In
general there is tight cooperation between the projects.

> Just thinking aloud...

Yeah. Maybe we should include a configure --with-icedtea-web option in
the main icedtea[6] repository that pulls in the plugin and webstart
tools just like it can pull in different versions of hotspot, cacao,
jaxp, etc. That way people can easily produce a full JDK and JRE with
all the free tools included without needing any proprietary software.

Thanks,

Mark