Talk:Blackdown Java

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I'd be interested to know what's the relationship between Blackdown Java and Sun's own Java, how the Blackdown project is run (maybe a team of volunteers?, their possible sponsors?). There's a lot not said here and in the blackdown.org site. Etz Haim 14:15, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

From memory, Blackdown is a port of Sun's Java to Linux. It's not open source. It's run by a bunch of volunteers who signed a scary NDA so that they could see Sun's code. It was much more important before Sun had an official Linux port. I'm unclear on how it differs from the official one now. I'm also not sure why none of this is on the blackdown.org site. --Slamb 19:10, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Sun made binary redistribution possible on September 27th, 1996, according to the an old version of Blackdown's site. Their website had diffs to the Sun JVM code. --Slamb 19:15, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If Blackdown is neither free nor open... shouldn't it be removed from the "Free compilers and interpreters" category? pcmacman 17:06, 14 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Blackdown was just a group of volunteers that signed the necessary licenses with Sun in order to access the source code and be able to redistribute binaries. We also did a bit of actual porting work, because at the time, there was (IIRC) not a Linux port of the JDK :). That was basically all to it - porting and proxying for all the Linux distributors that didn't want to sign the source code and redistribution license. ("We" means I was a (minor) member of the team [1]) cdegroot (talk) 11:49, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]