FOR TWO YEARS Sun Microsystems and the open sauce community have been working to free Java from encumbered propriety code, and that effort has finally reached an important milestone, it was announced this week at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.

The free and open, GPL licenced Java Development Kit OpenJDK, initially begun by Sun and completed by Red Hat's Iced Tea Project, passed the stringent testing requirements of the Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) - all 80,000 tests and 1 million lines of code. Passing the Java TCK verifies that the OpenJDK provides all of the required Java APIs and implements full Java runtime code portability to function just like any other Java SE 6 implementation.

Red Hat's free Fedora 9 Linux distribution for x86 and x86-64 architectures is the first to include the mature Iced Tea Project's Java version, but it will also be included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and will doubtlessly find its way into the other Red Hat derived Linux distributions. An earlier version of the Iced Tea Project's Java 1.7 implementation is already included in Mandriva's Red Hat derivative Spring 2008.1 release.

That version won't run my online poker playing Java applet yet, but I'm confident it will soon. µ

L'Inq
Jboss.org