By sheer coincidence—honest!—today marks two more milestones for the OpenJDK Community, right on the heels of another that was announced yesterday.

OpenJDK-6 Joe Darcy announced the publication of the source code for the JDK 6 Project, an effort to create a fully-free, fully-compatible implementation of the Java SE 6 specification.

This initial version was created by removing new features from a copy of the JDK 7 code, as Joe previously explained. What’s available today builds and runs but isn’t quite complete and is certainly not compatible. The focus of the Project going forward will be to replace the remaining bits of encumbered code (mainly the sound engine), achieve full TCK-tested compatibility, and make other changes as needed to better integrate into the major Linux distributions.

To learn more, please see Joe’s blog and the recent traffic on the jdk6-dev list. To get involved, please join us on that list!

Developers’ Guide Iris Clark posted the first draft of the OpenJDK Developers’ Guide, a living document that will attempt to condense the institutional knowledge of Sun’s JDK team into a readable format for new contributors. Creating this document will also, no doubt, help motivate us to fix various aspects of our internal practices as we adapt them to open development.

Please send comments on the Guide to the guide-discuss list.

Imaging and color APIs Finally, yesterday Phil Race reported that Sun has secured permission to open-source the imaging and color classes that have until now been encumbered. This code will be available in the second JDK 6 code bundle and then later in the JDK 7 Mercurial repositories.