It began back in November, when Eric S. Raymond called IBM's intention to release a fully open-source JRE and class libraries within the next year "about the worst-kept secret in the industry."

Now, 60 days on, traffic on the JPackage.org mailing list seems to unofficially confirm that a free JDK really is coming.

In a post to the list, which is a public list, Nicolas Mailhot wrote that "there may someday be a redistributable JVM RPM at jpackage, and someday may even be next week."

When asked by Weiqi Gao whether the vendor behind such a move was IBM, Mailhot replied that "this is supposed to be secret stuff" but confirmed only that it's a commercial vendor with 3 letters in its name.

So a free j2sdk done by jpackage might be right around the corner.

As UK computer consultant Pete Chown quipped: "I guess it isn't secret any more! Keeping something quiet on the Internet is always a hopeless task..."

The aim of the JPackage Project is to provide a coherent set of Java software packages for Linux, satisfying all quality requirements of other applications.