This afternoon was a keynote by Dalibor Topic on OpenJDK and the Future of Open Source Java on GNU/Linux. I downloaded the OpenJDK 7 couple of weeks ago and have been using it to run some of the desktop Java applications. Hearing about the development processes behind the JDK was great.
OpenJDK is the JDK released under GPL v2, not vanilla GPL license but a modified one with a CLASSPATH Exception. It is 25,169 source files of which 4% is binary only (called “plugs”) and 8% licensed under a different license than GPL v2. The objective is to get everything out in source form. The parts that are causing problems currently are:
- Font rasterizer
- Graphics rasterizer
- Sound engine
- Crypto provider
The fun fact was that after JDK went opensource, the Gentoo ebuild came out in couple of hours, the Fedora source RPM int the same night. Those enthusiasts :)
As it is only possible to compile OpenJDK with Sun JDK (Sun JDK having proprietary extensions) the IcedTea project was launched, currently it is already possible to compile OpenJDK with OpenJDK :)
In the beginning of the year the OpenJDK VCS has been switched to Mercurial, here is a list of repositories. So Linux is GIT and OpenJDK is Mercurial, great to see some large projects not running SVN or the old CVS for a change.
The best part of the speech was about getting Java apps as easily installable as the current C/C++ projects, just a “apt-get install”. Their stated requirements for OpenJDK are:
- Fully free – this is nearly complete
- Packaged correctly
- Reviewed and approved by distros
They are currently talking to Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo and OpenSuse. He stated that if your favourite distribution is not listed just contact him or the OpenJDK team.