Talk:IcedTea - Wikipedia

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This is not a reference[edit]

I've removed the below text from the intro since it claims to be a reference, but isn't. Gronky 12:04, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

<ref>Sun's goal is to replace the parts that remain proprietary and closed source with alternative implementations and make the class library completely free and open source. Since there's some encumbered code in the JDK, Sun will continue to use that code in commercial releases until it's replaced by fully-functional free and open-source alternatives</ref>

In fact it is a rewrite of a few quotes from Sun's FAQ on their OpenJDK website:

Q: What components of the JDK software are you open sourcing today? A: ... Now Sun is open sourcing most of the remaining components of the JDK, with the exception of a few encumbered components that we hope, with the community's help, can be re-implemented so that 100% of the OpenJDK code commons is available as free software.
Q: When will you finish clearing encumbrances? What is the timeline? A: With the community's help, we hope that encumbered code can be re-implemented over the next 6 to 12 months, balancing this critical engineering task with other priorities, and depending on the level of community participation in speeding this effort
Q: Will Sun's commercial JDK releases be built from the open-source code? A: Yes, for the most part. Since there's some encumbered code in the JDK, Sun will continue to use that code in commercial releases until it's replaced by fully-functional open-source alternatives [1]

May be I should have referenced this FAQ in the text. Hervegirod 00:01, 12 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that would be a good reference. The best possible way to do it would be:

<ref>{{cite web

|url=http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.jsp#b

|title=Sun's OpenJDK FAQ

|quote=blah blah few words from the FAQ blah blah

|}}</ref>

Gronky 07:20, 12 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

just did it. Is it OK for you ? Hervegirod 12:14, 22 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Compatibility Update[edit]

This seems relevant: Java is finally Free and Open 74.92.43.201 (talk) 20:39, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, marked as requiring an {{Update}}. Though anyone can dive in and start updating the article! —Sladen (talk) 23:49, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Versions[edit]

There are currently two release streams of IcedTea: IcedTea6 based on the OpenJDK6 sources, and IcedTea based on the OpenJDK sources. They have different current version numbers. Please leave the two boxes intact or find a way of merging all data. Do NOT just remove IcedTea6! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gnu andrew (talk • contribs) 19:30, 4 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ref 35 link is broken[edit]

rename[edit]

In ubuntu the switch of package names happened at the same time as the switch from 7 to 6. Does anyone know if this was also the case in fedora? Plugwash (talk) 09:10, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

non-NPOV[edit]

Unfortunately, IcedTea has become popular among package maintainers for the following *NIX distributions, even though it does not work at all with some applications.

and

Unfortunately, it does not work with many applications. Install sun-java6-jre instead.

Both of these sentences should be IMHO deleted as unevidenced point-of-view rants in the best of all possible interpretations being an independent research. Also, it doesn't consider a possibility that those "many applications" are in fact broken by using non-standard non-public proprietary interfaces of Sun/Oracle (com.* classes for example). However, without regards to the evidence, this kind of discussion is not proper part of Wikipedia article.

I will remove these sentences in near future, unless persuaded otherwise. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.177.109.184 (talk) 00:00, 28 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't write this, and I agree that these statements don't sound particularly NPOV, but I will note that the Zotero OpenOffice.org plug-in doesn't use any proprietary interfaces, but the doesn't work with IcedTea. In fact, no Firefox extension that uses Java works with the IcedTea plug-in. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if there are other cases of incompatibility. Simonster (talk) 22:13, 6 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

but what IS IT?[edit]

The article begins with IcedTea is a software development and integration project that says nothing. Only later you learn that this is some kind of open source Java virtual machine (and I'm still not sure about this.--Azarien (talk) 08:39, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Your question cannot be answered properly without a bit of background. This is a long and tortured story, so please understand I am drastically over-simplifying things here! Back in the 1990s, Sun re-invented Java as a web language (before that it was intended for set-top-boxes and other embedded systems... more on that later when we get to Android). Sun gradually moved towards more and more of their software products being not just free-to-download, but also open source, and in many cases free as in freedom (note these are not the same thing); this was partly due to their heritage in BSD of the 1970s and early 1980s, and partly due to Windows and Linux slowly destroying Sun's primary profit-center of UNIX servers and workstations during the late 1990s and early Aughties. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 17:50, 25 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Part of this gradual story was the release of Java under the GPL in 2007; this is a free-as-in-freedom license, with the exception that Sun retained copyright-ownership, and could therefore simultaneously release a proprietary flavor, in addition to the GPL flavor -- see multi-licensing. However, this re-licensing from proprietary to GPL in 2007 only covered *most* of the codebase and toolchain. If you wanted to use fonts, that was not possible (later this was fixed). Ditto for SNMP (to my knowledge this is still not fixed as of 2013). If you wanted to compile the JRE or JDK or normal java libraries, you had to use proprietary Sun compilers (or Microsoft compilers). As late as 2009, you could not have a JNLP or JWS applet in your browser; Sun was still not willing to release that portion of the crown jewels. Various attempts to fix these various problems existed, and some still exist. IcedTea is *two* of those attempts, or three, depending on how you count, all rolled into one. It is a solution for the proprietary-compiler-toolchain problem (replacing them with libre equivalents), and a solution for the java-applet-in-the-browser-plugin problem (implementing the necessary code).

Around this time, Sun was acquired by Oracle, along with MySQL and various other companies with street cred in the FLOSS world. Oracle's position on Java is that they will provide source-code, under the GPL, to the public -- as a reference implementation of the Java spec. This codebase is called OpenJDK. It does not include various performance-improvements and such, many of them particular to running Java on top of Microsoft Windows, which Oracle keeps in a private branch of the OpenJDK codebase. IBM contributes to OpenJDK, and builds their AIX and Linux JREs from it. Red Hat and Canonical also contribute to OpenJDK, but use OpenJDK+IcedTea when distributing JREs for their Linux distros, so as to not depend on proprietary software anywhere in the toolchain. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 17:50, 25 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oracle, meanwhile, still is the sole official place where Java JDK/JRE/plugins (built from Oracle's private branch) are distributed for Microsoft Windows. This is not because one could not use OpenJDK on windows, or even use IcedTea+OpenJDK+IcedTeaWeb on windows -- this is quite possible, and Alex Kasko has accomplished it on github[2]. However, there seems -- original research here sorry -- to be an unwritten agreement between Oracle and IBM/RedHat/Canonical, something along the lines of, Oracle promises not to withdraw support of OpenJDK on Linux PCs (since the codebase is GPL they could not prevent other folks from continuing the project... but copyright is not the only weapon of a large corporation when they have a patent portfolio and control of many other FLOSS projects and a large group of highly-paid lawyers available... but none of that would be necessary because simply making the Oracle-flavored Java on Windows be incompatible with the OpenJDK on Linux would be enough to dramatically de-value the latter). In return, nobody else tries to make running OpenJDK over on Windows PCs simple/easy/etc (which means IBM/RedHat/Canonical *only* provide OpenJDK packages for AIX/Fedora+RHEL/Ubuntu+LTS). (Running any sort of JRE on embedded devices is an entirely different story... Oracle and Google have exchanged lawsuits over that, see Dalvik... currently oracle charges USD$0.60 per device running J2SE[3]... not sure about the price of J2EE deployments). 74.192.84.101 (talk) 17:50, 25 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Microsoft, who one might assume would wish to have a version of Java on windows that was not provided by their competitor Oracle, could use the OpenJDK codebase to do so. However, this is very unlikely to ever happen: back in the day, Sun sued them over Java (and Microsoft lost), after which Microsoft invented C# as an alternative to Java, and ever since have been heavily pushing that instead. Furthermore, Microsoft is allergic to the GPL, in general, and doubly-allergic in this case since all Microsoft code would be GPL, whereas all Oracle code in their private branch would not -- every time Microsoft made an improvement to the hypothetical MSJVM7, the next day Oracle would get the same improvement (but not vice versa!). 74.192.84.101 (talk) 17:50, 25 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So, tl;dr -- IcedTea is a set of libre-friendly compilation tools that can build the OpenJDK without using VS2010, invented by Red Hat (mostly) to stick it to Microsoft (or to comply with the Fedora packaging-rules ... practically the same thing), and IcedTeaWeb is a libre-friendly Java plugin for web browsers. Both of them are theoretically cross-platform, just like Java, but in practice they are never seen on Microsoft Windows which runs 90% of desktops and laptops, and never seen on Google Android which runs 75% of tablets and smart phones. p.s. The reason for calling it IcedTea and IcedTeaWeb is because Java is trademarked by Oracle-fka-Sun, so it cannot be called OpenJavaToolchain and OpenJavaPlugin. HTH. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 17:50, 25 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also potentially of interest, as of August 2013, some of the developers behind Java_OpenGL are working on a Windows-compiled version of OpenJDK + IcedTeaWeb.[4] [5] [6] [7] [8] At least one of the developers believes that an implicit patent grant occurred when Sun released OpenJDK under GPL2, therefore, is planning to take the plunge and release OpenJDK compiled for windows/embedded/etc, from what I can gather. Note that they are based in Germany, which has already had some court cases related directly to upholding the GPL. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 21:12, 25 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Overlap with OpenJDK, Java Class Library and Free Java implementations[edit]

Parts of this article overlap with OpenJDK, Java Class Library and Free Java implementations. I'm not clear on what can be done about it though. I don't think the articles can be merged. Should a new article covering the overlapping parts be created? I cross-posted this discussion to all talk pages. --Chealer (talk) 21:39, 18 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Point of View[edit]

This sentence in the article violates WP:LABEL because it calls the promises "lies."

Sun has made continued promises about releasing their plugin and Web Start implementation as part of OpenJDK, but have so far they have been no more than lies,^[1] despite continued pressure from the community.^[2]

Ndanielm (talk) 04:18, 4 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Darcy, Joe (2009-06-08). "OpenJDK and the new plugin". Retrieved 2009-09-05.
^ Hughes, Andrew John (2009-08-21). "Opensource plugin&webstart - when?". Retrieved 2009-09-05.

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