What are some of Red Hats contributions to JDK?
Rich: Sure. That goes back to 2007 – or actually earlier, 2006, when some of the first components started to appear from Sun’s OpenJDK work. We started the project called IcedTea, which really had two aims. One was to remove some of those encumbrances that I had mentioned. There were encumbrances around audio, some of the restorizers, the Web Start. That’s actually part of the core J2SE platform. So a bunch of components that weren’t built, that weren’t truly free and open source. That was an impediment to getting OpenJDK into some of the Linux distributions like Fedora. The other aspect was providing a build environment to be able to build OpenJDK using only open source software. Again, that was a requirement for getting into some of the Linux distributions like Fedora. So those were two of the initial aims of IcedTea. There were a number of projects under IcedTea. One of them is Web Start, which I mentioned earlier. The browser plugin for Firefox, that was pushed forward by the IcedT
