Andrew Haley and Thomas Fitzsimmons wrote a really nice article for Red Hat Magazine called Open source project: OpenJDK detailing our libre java journey from the perspective of Fedora and Red Hat. From Sun’s first announcement, GNU Classpath & GCJ, bootstrapping IcedTea, gcjwebplugin, webstart, PPC and the zero port, OpenJDK6, to being (almost) Java SE Compatible. Go read it!

When you upgrade to Fedora 9, make sure you get the zero-day update of icedtea/openjdk that Lillian made. It includes some sound fixes, Gervill midi support, the hat tool and fixes for javaws/netx. Then try out Jake2 (GPLed Quake engine in Java using Jogl and Joal). Just click that Jake2 webstart link, it will just work out of the box. Awesome!

German court tells Skype to obey the GPL:

“If a publisher wants to publish a book of an author that wants his book only to be published in a green envelope, then that might seem odd to you, but still you will have to do it as long as you want to publish the book and have no other agreement in place.”

An EPEL update brought a nice surprise. The Fedora 9 IcedTea/OpenJDK packages rebuild for RHEL and CentOS on i386, ppc and x86_64. So if you are running RHEL or CentOS on your servers you can now:

$ rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
$ yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-{devel,plugin,demo,javadoc,src}

Rugged PDA available with JamVM and GNU Classpath

The Nomad maintains compliance with the MIL-STD-810F standard for drops, vibration, and temperature extremes, says SDG, and is IP67 rated for imperviousness to water and dust. It can withstand 30 minutes exposure under a meter of water, says SDG, as well as survive temperatures ranging from -22 to 144 degrees F. [...] Developers can create both AWT and Swing applications using the JamVM virtual machine and the GNU Classpath Libraries [...] the Nomad sells for $1,650 to $2,300.

A bit pricey, but so cool! :)