Re: Oracle Buys Sun

I've not yet taken a look at building the JDK from source.

So far all I have to go on is this:
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/build/raw-file/tip/README-builds.html

But, it sounds like if someone wanted to that they *could* fork the
JDK but there really isn't much call for it. Folks could have forked
Linux at many points but few of these survived. IIRC some
distributions maintained a Linux kernel fork with their own "secret
sauce" of improvements in areas such as drivers, schedulers, and media
support. You could do that with Java, but I suspect you'd get more
grief than adulation.

Having said that OpenJDK does mean for the lay Java user/developer
that if the official OpenJDK veers off in a direction that can't
support the rest of the ecosystem companies like RedHat and IBM could
band together and create a fork (think BSD) and call it something new.
I guess if Oracle seeks to change something drastic that would
negatively effect the OpenJDK ecosystem then we would see cause for a
fork. It sounds like there might be enough players in this space that
they could support something like a fork that if the community
absolutely had to... but why bother unless there's a real problem?

Thanks for the details.

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Chris Bredesen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Via the IcedTea project [1], OpenJDK is available today in Fedora (I'm
> running it on F10).  It is also shipped and supported with Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux.
>
> Red Hat does build OpenJDK but we don't really maintain a proper fork. The
> developers contribute actively upstream, etc.
>
> I'm using OpenJDK as my primary JDK and I have to say it is quite good.  I
> run Eclipse and JBoss Dev Studio on it as well as many verions of JBoss AS
> and EAP (the latter is actually certified on OpenJDK).  No real issues for
> me.
>
> Hope this answered your questions and didn't sound too much like a sales
> pitch (it wasn't intended as such).
>
> -Chris
>
> [1] http://icedtea.classpath.org
>
> Shawn Hartsock wrote:
>>
>> More thoughts on Oracle buying Sun
>>  http://www.javaworld.com/community/?q=node/2800
>>
>> And the real thread of concern seems to be centered on NetBeans,
>> GlassFish, and MySQL.
>>
>> Still I'm curious about what the OpenJDK really means
>> http://openjdk.java.net/ never built it myself. Could you do a JDK
>> distro? Could you wrap a JDK distro in a Linux distro for distribution
>> now? Anyone out there working on or with an open source JDK/JVM
>> variant? What would it mean to fork the OpenJDK and why would you want
>> to do that?
>>
>> I wonder if Oracle will change any of that. More importantly, does
>> this mean the Sun logo will change the way the JBoss logo did (or
>> didn't)?
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Don Brady <dbrady-d0/1ywxyuRNWk0Htik3J/[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> I though that we might as well mention it on the list since it will
>>> affect
>>> the future of Java.
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Juglist mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://trijug.org/mailman/listinfo/juglist_trijug.org
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>



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/** Shawn.Hartsock http://hartsock.blogspot.com/  //*/