Concept
IcedTea is a build and integration project for OpenJDK launched by Red Hat in June 2007. IcedTea also includes some addon libraries: IcedTea-Web is a free software implementation of Java Web Start and the Java web browser applet plugin. IcedTea-Sound is a collection of plugins for the Java sound subsystem, including the PulseAudio provider which used to be included with IcedTea. The Free Software Foundation recommends that all Java programmers use IcedTea as their development environment. Historically, the initial goal of the IcedTea project was to make the OpenJDK software, which Sun Microsystems released as free software in 2007, usable without requiring any proprietary software, and hence make it possible to add OpenJDK to Fedora and other Linux distributions that insist on free software. This goal was met, and a version of IcedTea based on OpenJDK was packaged with Fedora 8 in November 2007. April 2008 saw the first release of a new variant, IcedTea6, which is based on Sun's build drops of OpenJDK6, a fork of the OpenJDK with the goal of being compatible with the existing JDK6. This was released in Ubuntu and Fedora in May 2008. The IcedTea package in these distributions has been renamed to OpenJDK using the OpenJDK trademark notice. In June 2008, the Fedora build passed Sun's rigorous TCK testing on x86 and x86-64. IcedTea 2, the first version based on OpenJDK 7, was released in October 2011. IcedTea 3, the first version based on OpenJDK 8, was released in April 2016. Support for IcedTea 1 was dropped in January 2017. This project was created following Sun's release under open source licenses of its HotSpot Virtual Machine and Java compiler in November 2006, and most of the source code of the class library in May 2007. However, parts of the class library, such as font rendering, colour management and sound support, were only provided as proprietary binary plugins. This was because the source code for these plugins was copyrighted to third parties, rather than Sun Microsystems.