The “Break it Down” Blog

If you didn’t see it, RedHat announced earlier this week that their completely Open Source Java implementation (IcedTea) had finally passed the Java Test Compatability Kit (TCK).

While most folks rejoiced, I think there were a fair number of us that sighed and thought: Goddamnit, here’s the beginning of the Java fragmentation.

Or if that not, were at least sufficiently annoyed at two such large significant and completely parallel efforts. Well I suppose Linux did this for 20 years and look at the incredible market-share that has given it for a billion-times the man-hours of development that has gone into Linux distro-dev across the board compared to Windows or Mac.

Today we get the news that Sun is right around the corner with releasing their own completely free Java implementation (after Open Sourcing or replacing encumbered code). Now that is actually good news, but I have to imagine that RedHat’s announcement pushed that schedule up.

I know there are folks reading this that think “The more the merrier” and more folks that figure “How can open sourcing all this code be bad?”, when it was the GCJ or the Apache Harmony project, I didn’t really care. Neither of those projects had significant distribution capabilities and most folks would need to use them by choice if they wanted… neither were likely going to get significant footholds, especially in business deployments. But this time, it’s freaking RedHat… you know, the company that sells server solutions to companies.

RedHat isn’t going to abandon this IcedTea project anytime soon, not after all the money they pumped into it… so that means going forward, Fedora and RHEL are going to ship, out of the box, with an almost/mostly/kinda/sorta/ok/maybe-not 1-off version of Java that is just good enough and just compatible enough and, oh yea, covered in RedHat’s support contract with it’s customers that people will begin deploying to it. I’m guessing at least one other significant distro will pick it up and ship it as well.

NOTE: I’m happy IcedTea passed the TCK, but still expect a significant amount of differences between the platforms in hard-to-debug places that you only notice when your app starts behaving differently after a week of runtime… you know, those bugs that make you want to kill yourself.

To clarify, it’s not that I’m anti-Open Source or anti-RedHat or anti-Sun, I’m just insanely frustrated at the wasted resources and duplicated efforts to copy each other instead of actually providing solutions to developers… to make our lives easier.