OpenJDK and the new plugin

[Mark Wielaard]

On Mon, 2009-06-08 at 22:42 +0100, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> 2009/6/8 Joseph D. Darcy <Joe.Darcy at sun.com>:
> > Mark Wielaard wrote:
> >> On Sat, 2009-01-17 at 04:03 +0000, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> >>> 2009/1/17 Joseph D. Darcy <Joe.Darcy at sun.com>:
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm happy to announce that within the next few months as part of
> >>>> OpenJDK, we
> >>>> are Sun are committed to open sourcing our Java Web Start implementation
> >>>> and
> >>>> the new plug-in implementation for NPAPI capable browsers; those
> >>>> browsers
> >>>> including Firefox 3, amongst others.
> >>>
> >>> Woo! Great news!
> >>
> >> This is indeed really great!
> >>
> >> It has been a few months now. Is there already a roadmap for how and
> >> when the code will enter the repositories? Will it go into jdk6 first,
> >> or will it go through jdk7. Will it be part of the M4 milestone that has
> >> all the other 6u10 backported features?
> >
> > Since that posting, circumstances have changed and unfortunately there is no
> > specific time line to share for the webstart and new plug-in code being
> > available under open source.
>
> We'd better keep hacking on that replacement then...

Yes indeed. I am happy people did keep hacking on the free replacements
so that we have something for our user now that need an applet plugin or
webstart functionality.

But I am somewhat confused about what this really means. Isn't there any
commitment anymore with Sun to release the implementation of the
webstart and new plug-in code?

What are the circumstances that changed?
Is there anything the community can do to help?

Thanks,

Mark