Reported 10 years ago
The issue was reported 10 years ago in 2001:
http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=4421494
(The bug report also contains a suggested fix.)
There is a test for this issue in the Free Software Jacks mauve testsuite:
http://sourceware.org/mauve/jacks.html
So none of the free software java implementations had this bug since they
ran this testsuite. But apparently the Sun java implementation was never tested
against it.
Luckily now that OpenJDK is available under the GPL someone already posted
a fix to the core-libs mailinglist last week:
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2011-February/005795.html