Red Hat signs on to Sun's open-source Java project

Aligns its Java development efforts for Linux with the project, OpenSDK

By Elizabeth Montalbano, New York | Tuesday, 06 November 2007
Red Hat has signed on to participate in Sun Microsystems' open-source Java Standard Edition (SE) project, OpenJDK, and to coordinate its own Java development efforts for Linux with the project.

Red Hat has signed Sun's OpenJDK contributor agreement and will now align the work its done on its IcedTea project, which was its own implementation of some parts of the Java SE JDK, with OpenSDK, said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management for JBoss.

IcedTea brought together the Fedora project with key Java technologies in a Linux environment, and currently provides open-source alternatives for the few remaining proprietary sections in the OpenJDK project, he said. Fedora is a Red-Hat sponsored Linux project.

Red Hat also has licensed the OpenJDK Community Test Compatibility Kit (TCK), which allows Red Hat to build an implementation of OpenJDK and test it to ensure its compatible with the implementation the project itself develops, he said. The Java SE JDK, the basis for OpenJDK, includes the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) as well as tools for developing Java applets and applications; it is the software that is the basis for desktop Java applications.

As part of its participation in the OpenJDK project, Red Hat eventually will create a compatible OpenJDK implementation for its Enterprise Linux distribution. It also will also use OpenJDK to create a runtime for its JBoss Enterprise Middleware that is optimized for a Linux environment, according to the company.

Prior to its purchase of JBoss and its Java-based middleware last April, Red Hat and Sun were competitors in the OS market, and Red Hat wasn't very active in the community that supports Java development. However, now that the company is pushing its open-source strategy beyond Linux and using JBoss as its first step to get there, Java is becoming more integral to its overall product plan.

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