Better Living Through OpenJDK: IcedTea, BrandWeg, and SoyLatte

When the GNU Classpath developers joined into the OpenJDK project, it was hard to predict what would happen. Their first attempt to collaborate directly with a major Java vendor through Apache Harmony didn’t quite end up as planned, so there was suspicion among the open source pundits that they won’t be able to work together with Sun, either.

Fortunately, the skeptics turned out to be wrong. In the past year, OpenJDK grew beyond just being a Sun-sponsored project, to spawn collaborations with existing GNU Classpath based VMs, fresh porting projects, and spin offs.

We’ll dig into the ecosystem that’s evolving around OpenJDK, how it feeds back into the main project, and what it all means for you.