Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Jun 2008 20:28 UTC, submitted by Rahul
Back in May 2006, Sun announced during the JavaOne conference it would release Java as open source, licensed as GPL software. While it was released as GPL, it still contained about 5 percent proprietary, non-free code - the Java trap, as the FSF calls it. The FSF called to dismantle this trap, and now the IcedTea project has reached an important milestone.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
As it was, it was impossible to simply ship a JRE or a JDK in a distribution as-is, and it was impossible for people to debug and track bugs in the tradition of open source development against such a piece of software. "
It was not impossible. Many distributions did so. It was also not impossible to debug and track bugs since the source code was available -- just not under an open license.
Apart from the last five percent, which we have heard nary anything from Sun on in the past two years other than "We're working on it". Net effect? You still needed a JRE or a JDK from Sun. [/q]
If you had been involved with the OpenJDK effort, you would have heard a lot more than that.
I think you're way too disconnected from the process.