Red Hat's Plans For Java: Make Iced Tea

During JavaOne 2007 we told you Sun's Java is now fully open-source with the availability of OpenJDK, and as a result Red Hat is now planning for its adoption. One of those on the Red Hat Java team is Tom Fitzsimmons, which earlier today blogged about Red Hat's OpenJDK plans. Red Hat's temporary name for the OpenJDK package is "IcedTea" (due to legal restrictions the package can't be called "OpenJDK"). One IcedTea RPM is already available, but it requires some non-free packages for building. Fitzsimmons goes on to add that Red Hat is working on replacing these bits of codes with those from the GNU class-path. Red Hat is also establishing icedtea.classpath.org as a temporary place for the collection of the IcedTea / Sun OpenJDK contributions. Furthermore, Red Hat is also focusing on testing out IcedTea on other architectures outside of x86 and x86_64. Once everything is settled, they will be working on integrating OpenJDK into both Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as Fedora. Red Hat will continue to support GCJ where it is already in use, but all future efforts will be focused on OpenJDK, or "IcedTea".