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Sun's goal was to replace the parts that remain proprietary and closed-source with alternative implementations and make the class library completely free and open source. In the meantime, a third-party project called IcedTea created a completely free and highly usable JDK by replacing encumbered code with either stubs or code from GNU Classpath. However OpenJDK has since become buildable without the encumbered parts (from OpenJDK 6 b10cite-ref-93[93]) and has become the default runtime environment for most Linux distributions.cite-ref-94[94]cite-ref-95[95]cite-ref-96[96]cite-ref-97[97]

In June 2008, it was announced that IcedTea6 (as the packaged version of OpenJDK on Fedora 9) has passed the Technology Compatibility Kit tests and can claim to be a fully compatible Java 6 implementation.cite-ref-98[98]

Because OpenJDK is under the GPL, it is possible to redistribute a custom version of the JRE directly with software applications,cite-ref-99[99]cite-ref-100[100] rather than requiring the enduser (or their sysadmin) to download and install the correct version of the proprietary Oracle JRE onto each of their systems themselves.

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