Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 7th Jun 2007 22:40 UTC, submitted by Mark Wielaard
Red Hat just made it possible to bootstrap OpenJDK using only Free Software by building on top of gcj and replacing the binary blobs with code from GNU Classpath. The result is called IcedTea. IKVM also made a GNU Classpath/OpenJDK hybrid making it possible to run parts of the OpenJDK class libraries on mono and .net. And finally the Cacao team released a
new version of Cacao that can use either GNU Classpath for a full J2SE implementation or that uses the Sun GPL J2ME libraries, including jits for lots of different architectures (alpha, arm, mips, ppc, ppc64, x86 and x86_64).
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Member since:2006-01-02
IcedTea at this point is highly experimental (by definition), so I'd expect to see all sorts of issues.
The initial goal was to get OpenJDK to build without having to rely on binary encumbrances, using the free software code from Classpath to fill out the gaps.
Whether that turns out to be the best way forward (wrt to compatibility), we don't know yet, but now that there is working code out there, we can begin to find out. 
Edited 2007-06-08 12:56
Member since:
2005-07-06
ok if I write some java code (write once, deploy many, as they used to say) will I find 'compatibilty issues' with these various implementaions?