I’m very pleased that IBM and Or­a­cle are going to work more closely to­gether, and that we’re going to do so in the Open­JDK Com­mu­nity. IBM en­gi­neers will soon be work­ing di­rectly along­side Or­a­cle en­gi­neers, as well as many other con­trib­u­tors, on the Java SE Plat­form ref­er­ence im­ple­men­ta­tion—start­ing with JDK 7.

I ex­pect IBM’s en­gi­neers to con­tribute pri­mar­ily to the class li­braries, work­ing with the rest of us to­ward a com­mon source base for use atop mul­ti­ple Java vir­tual ma­chines. We each have sig­nif­i­cant on­go­ing in­vest­ments in our re­spec­tive JVMs; that’s where most of the en­ter­prise-level fea­ture dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion be­tween our re­spec­tive prod­ucts is found, and it makes sense for that to con­tinue. Fo­cus­ing our ef­forts on a sin­gle source base for the class li­braries will ac­cel­er­ate the over­all rate of in­no­va­tion in the JDK, im­prove qual­ity and per­for­mance, and en­hance com­pat­i­bil­ity across all im­ple­men­ta­tions.

Our tighter col­lab­o­ra­tion will be ev­i­dent not just in Open­JDK but also in the Java Com­mu­nity Process. IBM has en­dorsed Or­a­cle’s pro­posal for Java SE 7 and Java SE 8, which al­ready has strong sup­port from across the com­mu­nity. We’ll also join forces to en­hance the Java Com­mu­nity Process so that it re­mains the pri­mary stan­dards body for Java spec­i­fi­ca­tions.

This is ex­cel­lent news, for the Java SE Plat­form and for Open­JDK. I’ve got­ten to know many of IBM’s top Java en­gi­neers over the years, and I now look for­ward to work­ing more closely with them.