IBM to join OpenJDK

blogs.sun.com

75 points·icey··11 comments

What's the enterprise-level feature differentiation he's referring to? Surely the point of Java having a reference implementation is that any JAR will run on any JVM?

monitoring, perhaps interesting memory reclamation issues, GC tweaking, yadda yadda. there are lots of features that have absolutely nothing to do with formal language semantics.

Exactly: Diagnosability and serviceability features (especially when deeply integrated with the underlying OS), code generation algorithms optimized for specific hardware, GC algorithms tuned to specific memory hierarchies, etc.

Encryption on disk/tape and CORBA endpoints to z/OS legacy.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/tools/java/products/j...

This is interesting. It seems as if Apache Harmony is the jilted party in that IBM will stop putting their efforts there, and concentrate on OpenJDK.

Maybe they didn't want to potentially get hit by a Oracle lawsuit like Google did.

Hitting IBM with a patent lawsuit is like hitting Mike Tyson with a boxing glove.

or trying to steal his tiger...

Quick trivia: what company has the largest patents portfolio in the US (and probably the largest in the world)?

No, that has nothing to do with it.

The oracle patents are on VM implementation, not class library -- and IBM has a license for those patents, and is going to continue to develop their VM while collaborating on the class library.

There are two other big contributors for Harmony project: Intel(provided JVM called DRLVM) and Google, who is using it's classes in Android.

It's nice seeing IBM working on OpenJDK, it would be great if they would share some of their J9 tech like Oracle is doing now with JRockit.

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