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I really, really want this to be true | 503 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
I really, really want this to be true
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 01:15 PM EDT
Thankyou for this enjoyable discussion. I would like to draw your attention to a
fact you may no be are of:

Sun has provided a special version of the TCK license that is targeted to any
Java implementation that is a derivative of OpenJDK

Hence Apache and Davik can't use this TCK. I Accept this. But the case I'm
trying to make is that because openJDK and icedTea exist and are GPL+CE AND have
passed Sun/Oracle's TCK - then by the 'backdoor' of Reflection and fair-use the
API is defacto total public domain (not even GPL!). Since an icedTea binary
advertises the full API on its classpath at runtime

see here:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/icedtea_tck

the IcedTea Project reached an important milestone - The latest OpenJDK binary
included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test
Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs
and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation - in keeping with the
portability goal of the Java platform

As discussed previously on InfoQ , the IcedTea project is able to be a 100%
GPL-licensed Java implementation by utilizing OpenJDK release snapshots, and
replacing the remaining 5% of propertiary components with replacements from the
GNU Classpath project.

The IcedTea project was created by the GNU Classpath team along with a
handful of RedHat developers due to the need to replace all of the proprietary
code with open source implementations. GNU Classpath provides many GPL-licensed
replacements of the proprietary-licensed binary plugs still found in OpenJDK,
making an IcedTea build of OpenJDK more-readily available for distributions on
platforms such as Redhat's Fedora Linux distribution. Fedora 9 contains
functionally complete OpenJDK packages, in part due to the contributions from
IcedTea.

Other open-source Java implementations, such as Apache Harmony, have been unable
up to this point to pass the TCK, however not all of the difficulties have been
related to technical issues. In April of 2007, the Apache Software Foundation
sent an open letter to Sun Microsystems with the intent of solving key issues
with licensing the TCK for testing against the Harmony platform; licensing
issues that prevented the Harmony team from legally running the TCK in an
open-source way. While Sun responded to the open letter, there has as-of-yet
been no resolution of the licensing issues for the Harmony team, and they are
still unable to run the TCK.

The IcedTea project is not subject to the same licensing issues as Apache
Harmony, as Sun has provided a special version of the TCK license that is
targeted to any Java implementation that is a derivative of OpenJDK; something
that Apache Harmony cannot claim.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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