David Herron's Blog

May 2008 Archives

OpenJDK Regression Test Harness, also known as jtreg, now available as open source

Go to openjdk.java.net and scroll your eyes down to the Tools section of the navigation bar. You will see a link that's been there a long time, jtreg harness. There is new stuff behind that link now available. Today we have made this harness open source under the GPL+Classpath license combo. (Jonathan Gibbons' announcement)

The OpenJDK Regression Test Harness, also known as jtreg, is the test harness used in the OpenJDK for running unit and regression tests. Jtreg is a wrapper around JT Harness which simplifies its use. Documentation is on the jtreg harness home page.

How is this important? Previously jtreg had been available under the most liberal closed source binary license you could imagine. The license said you can do essentially anything you want with the binary jtreg distribution. No matter how liberal that binary license, it interfered with the ability of some Linux distros to make use of the unit and regression tests. I wish to thank the project members of these Linux distros for explaining the importance and distinction between the most liberal binary license you can imagine and a proper open source license. Once I groked the distinction it deepened my understanding of the open source culture.

In the end what is important is that OpenJDK builds are as high quality as possible. Enabling the distro's to run the unit and regression tests help them have comfort in knowing the tests passed.

Open media and open screens

On an earlier blog posting a commenter asked: "I would like to know how to use the VLC media player stack as the media handler for OpenJDK.." so, yeah, I hear you, there are many asking for better media support in the Java platform. It's with interest that I read Adobe's announcement today of the Open Screen Project. Hey, cool, if you dig around there are documents describing the byte level details of the SWF and FLV and F4V formats. I feel as Nick Main does in 'SWF Spec is now less restrictive !' I've also thought it would be great to have a SWF player implemented in Java and using the newest graphics improvements in the latest JRE's. And, hey, the documents are right there that says in details what the SWF/FLV/etc formats are, especially as they are saying "removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications".

We should be clear, however, that this appears not to be an open source announcement despite Adobe's use of the word 'Open'. Not being a lawyer the following is my best understanding - the documents are under a restrictive license that allows you to print the document once, and you cannot redistribute those documents. So the specification is openly published, as they say, but not open source. I couldn't find any software source code, FWIW.

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