On November 12, 2006, I wrote Java Is Free, about the GPL’ing of the Sun Java source code. It was a good day. The job wasn’t 100% finished then, because there was encumbered code we couldn’t GPL. As of today, it’s pretty well done. With contributions from a bunch of people and organizations, especially Red Hat’s Fedora community and the Iced Tea project, the missing pieces are filled in and the TCK has been passed. Most people don’t realize what a huge hurdle the TCK is; we are talking about a whole lot of tedious, unexciting, exacting, work, and we all owe a tip of the hat to the people who ground their way through it.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Steve Loughran (Jun 21 2008, at 01:46)
Almost all free: your employer still won't let apache run the same test kit without embracing GPL or providing some field of use limitations on their clean room JVM
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From: Paul Libbrecht (Jun 24 2008, at 03:35)
Indeed, I wish it will come true.
I still meet from time to time people that refuse to install java because it's not clean open-source. All sorts of people, including the maintainers of the wikipedia infrastructure.
How long would you expect until it becomes a full-fledged debian-package?
Java had for a long time this horrible feeling of being "for companies only" under the eyes of some. I wish and hope it'll leave.
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