Friends

Posted on November 5, 2007, 16:57.

Red Hat and Sun Collaborate to Advance Open Source Java Technology

“Red Hat fully supports Sun‘s courageous decision to open source Java technology. After more than 10 years of continuous leadership, the Java technology ecosystem will enter an era of accelerated innovation and benefit from extreme pervasiveness on a wide range of environments,” said Sacha Labourey, CTO of JBoss, a division of Red Hat. “Through these strategic agreements, Red Hat commits to contribute to the Java platform and distribute a compatible, open source Java software implementation.”

One of the first benefits of this agreement is tighter alignment with the IcedTea project, which brings together Fedora and JBoss.org technologies in a Linux environment. IcedTea provides Free Software alternatives for the few remaining proprietary sections in the OpenJDK project.

“Sun welcomes Red Hat to the OpenJDK community,” said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software at Sun Microsystems. “It is a vote of confidence to have Red Hat, a leader in open source, engaging with the community on such a broad scale. When we open-sourced our Java software implementation, we hoped to see just this kind of collaboration between the GNU/Linux world and the Java technology ecosystem. It is gratifying to see the promise of open-source Java technology coming true with Red Hat’s leadership.”

Interesting times.

5 Comments

  1. Dave Gilbert says:
    November 5, 2007 at 18:56

    Great news! Red Hat have for many years committed significant resources to Free Java projects (GCJ, GNU Classpath etc), and it’s brilliant that their efforts are now being pooled together with Sun’s. We knew this was happening since the OpenJDK announcement, but it’s still great to see the formal announcement.

  2. James says:
    November 6, 2007 at 03:14

    Re the discussion in #redmonk, I had a quick look at the closed binaries in SXCE – a lot could be replaced with GNU utilities, most of the rest is crypto and drivers, both x86 and SPARC. Sun really wants SPARC support and compatability with their existing binaries, so I don’t see a completely open OpenSolaris coming from Nexenta.

  3. tecosystems » links for 2007-11-06 says:
    November 6, 2007 at 07:28

    […] Mark J. Wielaard ยป Friends mjw on the Red Hat / Java news (tags: redhat java mjw openjdk icedtea) […]

  4. The Sun / Red Hat Java announcement: 2002 or 2007? « The Wayward Word Press says:
    November 7, 2007 at 06:27

    […] The Sun / Red Hat Java announcement: 2002 or 2007? A few hours back I read Steve O’Grady’s latest daily links, and found therein a link to Mark J. Wielaard’s post Friends. […]

  5. dave shields says:
    November 7, 2007 at 15:12

    Mark,

    Thanks for this post, which inspired me to write one in response:

    http://daveshields.wordpress.com/2007/11/06/the-sun-red-hat-java-announcement-2002-or-2007/

    dave

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