Fedora and Java - just give us the facts

[Rahul Sundaram]

Timothy Murphy wrote:

> Thanks for this pointer.
> As far as I can see, IcedTea/OpenJDK
> is not yet ready for general use
> (though there is an IcedTea Fedora-7 RPM).

OpenJDK (https://openjdk.dev.java.net/) is Sun Java under the GPL + 
Classpath exception. Iced Tea (http://icedtea.classpath.org/) is a Red 
Hat effort to bootstrap OpenJDK using only Free and open source software 
since OpenJDK still has some proprietary components 
(http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.jsp#h4_1)

> So it seems the choice is between Fedora's Java Development packages
> and Sun's standard Java, which I assume Fedora dislikes for licence reasons.

Correct. Also GCJ and classpath has been ported to more architectures 
than OpenJDK and is capable of compiling to native executable code.

Rahul