Red Hat signs up to Open Java

After holding off for a long time Red Hat has finally signed an OpenJDK Community agreement and joined the Open Java project..

The move will see all Red Hat engineers working on any and all of Sun Microsystems' free and open source projects.

Red Hat will also get access to Sun's Java test suite to ensure complete compatibility for developed Java applications.

Sacha Labourey, chief technical officer at JBoss, a division of Red Hat, said: "Through these strategic agreements, Red Hat commits to contribute to the Java platform and distribute a compatible, open source Java software implementation."

Less than five per cent of Java is now in a proprietary format and the OpenJDK Community aims to make the whole code completely open as soon as possible.

"This is excellent news. Over the past year or so we have learned a lot from some of Red Hat's best hackers: Andrew Haley, Mark Wielaard, Tom Fitzsimmons, Tom Tromey and Anthony Green," said Mark Reinhold, chief engineer for Java at Sun.

"They have been generous with their advice and patient with our progress toward truly open development."

The first collaboration is a project called IcedTea, a workaround in the next generation of Java that will get around proprietary binary plugs within Java to further open source the code.

红帽签约加入SUN的开源Java项目OpenJDK

红帽正式签约加入SUN的开源Java 标准版（SE）项目——OpenJDK中，为此，红帽将会把自己在Linux上的Java开发成果归入这一项目中。

红帽JBoss首席产品总监Shaun Connolly说，红帽已经签署了SUN的OpenJDK捐献条约，并将其IcedTea项目归入OpenJDK中。

IcedTea本是红帽Java SE JDK方面的一个项目。它将Fedora 项目和Java的核心技术融合在Linux环境下，是OpenJDK项目中少数几个非开源部分的代替者。

红帽同时还签署了OpenJDK Community Test Compatibility Kit (TCK)，从而可以构建OpenJDK应用并测试其兼容性。Java SE JDK作为OpenJDK的基础，包括Java运行环境（JRE）以及Java进程和应用的开发工具，这个软件服务于Java桌面应用。

作为OpenJDK项目签约的一部分，红帽还将建立与OpenJDK兼容的Enterprise Linux 版本，同时还将使用OpenJDK来为JBoss Enterprise Middleware 创建一个runtime。

起先，红帽与SUN本是竞争对手，尤其在OS市场。但由于红帽在Java开发方面投入了较大精力，而且在开源方面的脚步已不仅限于Linux和JBoss，于是Java也越来越成为红帽整个产品中重要的部分。