Contributing writer: Thomas Fitzsimmons
At the 2006 JavaOne conference, Sun announced plans to open source Java. This wasn’t exactly a surprise to those of us working on Java at Red Hat, given that there had been rumblings before. But this was a real announcement. We were immediately interested in learning exactly which license Sun would choose. Even if it was a legitimate open source license, it still might not allow us to combine our code with Sun’s.
We have been working on free Java for many years–most particularly through gcj, a project started at Cygnus in 1998 by a developer named Per Bothner. Gcj has been steadily improving over the years, but still wasn’t fully Java-compatible, partly because we couldn’t get permission to run the official Java compatibility test suite. We had also been working on GNU Classpath, which is GNU’s free replacement for the core Java class libraries from Sun. We were very curious to see the “official version.” » Read more
