IcedTea 7 has a much shorter release cycle compared to OpenJDK 7. IcedTea releases roughly correspond to Oracle Java security releases and contain the same security patches where applicable, so, IcedTea 7 can be used to build up-to-date OpenJDK 7 builds on Windows and Mac OS X platforms.

Performing full IcedTea 7 builds on a non-Linux platform might be difficult because the build configuration step expects Linux as a host platform. Instead of this, the IcedTea project can be used to patch OpenJDK sources on Linux, and then the patched sources can be built on other platforms using the usual OpenJDK 7 build steps.