Luya is wondering whether Sun's recent press release, stating that they will be allowing distribution of their closed binary Java stack together with the operating system such as debian, fedora et al., means something for the GCJ project or Fedora.
The GCJ project is the GNU Compiler for Java, which aims to be a free replacement for the proprietary JDK from Sun. Right now, it's not there yet, but it's getting there.
However, it's good enough to compile the Java bits from OpenOffice. More about Java on Fedora can be seen on the Fedora Wiki.
For the casual user GCJ is enough. I've been using it for my University assignments exclusivly and it works like a charm. Even though, the compilerun is slooooow.
Anyway, back to Luya's question. Will the ability to ship the closed source JRE and JDK mean that Fedora's focus will shift from GCJ and Classpath?
The easy answer is
no.
Fedora is all about free and open software. This will mean, that a closed source Java stack won't get into the Fedora Core nor will it get into Fedora Extras.
In case you need the JRE or JDK from Sun for your Fedora installation, the
JPackage Project has some good RPMs.
Actually, the real question should have been, does Sun feel that it's hand is being forced by projects such as GCJ and GNU Glasspath?