Red Hat has announced that it has signed two deals with Sun Microsystems thanks to which the upcoming versions of its Red Hate Enterprise Linux will start to integrate a fully compatible open-source Java Development Kit or JDK. For this thing to become possible, Red Hat has had to sign Sun Microsystems’ broad contributor agreement, according to which Red Hat’s engineers will start participating in all the open-source projects led by Sun Microsystems.

Red Hat has also had to sign Sun Microsystems’ OpenJDK Community Technology Compatibility Kit (or TCK) License Agreement. Thanks to this agreement Red Hat will get full access to the test suite, which determines whether an implementation of Java Standard Edition complies with the Java SE 6 specifications. These agreements have paved the way for Red Hat to create a Java Development Kit for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Java Runtime Environment.

According to the vice president of JBoss products at Red Hat, Shaun Connolly, thanks to these two deals the Red Hat Enterprise Linux users will finally be able to create “one of the key missing ingredients of the open-source stack”, that is an open-source Java Development Kit implementation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. "We feel this will help accelerate the direction and innovation and performance ... by letting the larger community, the larger collection of eyeballs, get access to that.” – Shaun Connolly has also added.

According to Connolly, thanks to this move, the corporate users of the Red Ha operating systems will become able to also get help directly from Red Hat rather than through third-party providers.

However, before being included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the JDK will be first developed and tested in Red Hat’s Fedora community-based Linux operating system.