On Nov 6, 3:07 am, Ramon F Herrera <ra...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> One can't help but wonder whether the next step is the integration of
> NetBeans into Eclipse...
Nothing to wonder about. This is about IcedTea, RedHat's fork of
OpenJDK. RedHat forked this (claiming it is no fork) because Sun made
it impossible to contribute back to OpenJDK in bulk. IcedTea merged
parts of Classpath into OpenJDK to get an unen***bered, clean free
software Java. These changes couldn't be put back into OpenJDK,
because Sun had wrapped OpenJDK in a bunch of red tape. Only
individuals, singing a contributor agreement, could get stuff into
OpenJDK. Now RH got a cor****ate contributor agreement. So RH can now
put IcedTea changes back into OpenJDK. This is Sun's venue to finally
get Classpath code into OpenJDK. Sun is very cautious about code
contributed to any of their open source projects, fearing poisoning
with non-free code. Now they have someone (RedHat) signing for that
code and taking responsibility.
Further, RedHat couldn't call the result from IcedTea Java, because
Java is a Sun trademark and Sun requires that a product called Java
has passed Sun's compatibility test. Now RedHat has got a license for
that compatibility test. It is easy to guess what they'll try to do
with that test: Making IcedTea the predominant OpenJDK-based free-
software Java implementation/distribution on Linux.
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