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Blackdown Java

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Blackdown Java was a port of Sun Microsystems's Java virtual machine to Linux by a group of volunteers led by Karl Asha and Juergen Kreileder.[1] It predated Sun's official Linux port, and supported Linux on architectures that the official version did not, including SPARC and PowerPC.[2] At its close, Blackdown had released J2SE versions 1.4.2 on i386 and AMD64, 1.4.1 on SPARC, and 1.3.1 on PowerPC[3][4][5] Work on J2SE 1.5.x for x86, AMD64, SPARC, and PowerPC was noted as being underway, but no releases were apparent on the main website.[6]

In 1999 Sun Microsystems hat to publicly apologize to the Blackdown developers[7]. Days before the apology Sun, together with Inprise, had announced[8] a port of Java to Linux, shunning Blackdown and Blackdown's Linux porting work and not giving them credit. The Sun/Inprise port, however, was based on Blackdown work[9]. The incident revealed that there were long standing problems between Sun and Blackdown.

Despite widespread confusion, Blackdown was neither free software nor open-source software. It was the default Java in Gentoo Linux and many other distributions, because the binary redistribution policy allowed it to be pre-installed or distributed through that distribution's package management system, whereas at the time, Sun Java's binary redistribution policy did not.

Since Java 5, the Operating System Distributor License for Java (DLJ) meets many Linux distributions' requirements, so it is now the default for at least Gentoo Linux, unless you specify Java 1.4 or earlier, for which the DLJ does not apply.

The Blackdown project ended in August 2007.[10][11] The Java software itself still exists on many mirrors.

Notes

  1. ^ "Java Linux Contact Information". Archived from the original on 2007-08-19. Retrieved 2009-06-15. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; 2007-08-07 suggested (help)
  2. ^ "Java Platform 2 Version 1.3.x for Linux". Archived from the original on 2007-08-11. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
  3. ^ "Java Platform 2 for Linux: Status and Information". Archived from the original on 2007-08-09. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
  4. ^ "Java 2 SE 1.4.2-03 Release Notes". Archived from the original on 2007-08-07. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
  5. ^ "Java Platform 2 Version 1.3.x for Linux". Archived from the original on 2007-08-11. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
  6. ^ "Java Platform 2 Version 1.5.x for Linux". Archived from the original on 2007-06-27. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
  7. ^ "Sun apologizes to developers of Java on Linux". Retrieved 2010-10-25.
  8. ^ "PRNewswire: Inprise Collaborates With Sun...on...Java(TM) 2 Platform For...Linux..." Retrieved 2010-10-25.
  9. ^ "LinuxGrrls: New JDK for Linux snubs Blackdown developers". Retrieved 2010-10-25.
  10. ^ Malinovich, Alex. "Blackdown Java Retires". Retrieved 2009-06-15.
  11. ^ "Java Linux Homepage". Archived from the original on 2007-09-12. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
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