Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 13th Feb 2008 20:50 UTC, submitted by Mark Wielaard
The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from OpenJDK using Free Software build tools and provides replacements libraries for the binary plugs with code from the GNU Classpath project. This release adds the "Zero-assembler" port which will allow IcedTea to run with zero (ok, minimal) porting effort on any GNU/Linux architecture that has a gcc and libffi port available. JNLP support has been added through the addition of NetX, which makes a lot of java webstart applications work out of the box. Check out the screenshots. Gary Benson will give a talk about the zero-assembler port at FOSDEM during the free Java developer meeting where GNU Classpath, OpenJDK and many other Free Java projects come together to plan the future of Free Java on GNU/Linux.
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Member since:2006-08-01
Member since:2006-01-27
It is generally considered a good thing knowing wtf you're talking about before actually posting a comment.
Last time I checked the OpenJDK project (which btw is the official Sun effort to open the JDK under the GPLv2 with classpath exception) was possible to bootstrap resorting exclusively to open source software and was more than 97% feature complete, with some subsystems such as crypto and JNLP stubbed. This new work towards both of these technologies will increase the compatibility even more and is an important milestone.
IcedTea is already supported and included as the default JVM in Fedora 8.
Edited 2008-02-13 23:40 UTC
Member since:2006-08-01
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2005-07-17
This makes the "free" Java project somewhat usable moving out of the extreme hobby project relm. Good for them. While Java is "free as in money" it's still heavily patented and copyrighted. It's extensive use at the student and enterprise level has had many Pure-OSS fans up in arms for years... afraid of the days when you had to BUY a C++ compiler to do any programming at all returning if Sun didn't stop "moving the cheese" or open up. Sun's even opened a free version of Java up to the point it is "blessed" as "real java" and can meet OSS rules.
That means 100% OSS projects like Debian can include Java compatibility in the distro, it also opens up all the cool R&D people have been doing and putting into OSS, but projects like Debian wouldn't touch any of that because the base language of Java wasn't free. Now the "real" OSS people will support Java fully as an OSS platform. Now there's no excuse to bother with Mono either!