OSNews

In this exclusive interview, Rich Sharples, Product Management Director at Red Hat, talks about OpenJDK. the free and open source implementation of the Java SE platform. The IcedTea project, one of Red Hat's major contributions to the OpenJDK ecosystem, has done a great deal to enable upstream adoption of Java on the Linux platform; however, the question remains whether Java would've been more ubiquitous throughout the Linux universe had Sun open sourced Java much sooner than it actually did. Rich discusses some of these issues and talks about some of the new features in OpenJDK 7, as well as the impact that dynamic languages, increased modularity and virtualization will have on the Java platform. He also describes the impact he thinks Oracle's acquisition will have on licensing options around OpenJDK.