Java set free
This is quite a milestone for the IT industry and community as a whole. Big pay-off too for those who have been betting on this move.
After countless pressure from various quarters - notably IBM - SUN will now fulfil its promise made by their new CEO, Jonathan Schwarz - to release Java under GPL.
One thing I've not yet checked is whether the JVM is also being released under GPL - that would be icing on the cake for many eager software engineers out there!
More here.
I wonder if Mono will maintain an interest in the community now that this has occurred.
What will IBM do now that they've got what they wanted?
Who else cares?
Above are some of the thoughts going through my head right now.
UPDATE 18/5/07:
Does Sun's open-sourcing of Java have an impact on the way Google views Java as a development platform?
"It doesn't change how we're looking at it, but it does increase
the utility of Java for us. So before they had released Java as GPL, we
had signed a source code agreement with them where we could give them
patches and bugs and all this other stuff—because we have a lot of
fairly advanced Java development going on at the company. We have folks
like Joshua Bloch working for us and he's a very prominent Java
developer and he's involved in the Java Community Process very heavily.
So we always had a way of getting patches in and some features
developed. So that was fine for us. But with it being open source, it's
actually better for us in a lot of ways, because we can access certain
parts of the code in ways we couldn't before. And we can fix them and
offer those fixes up without as much ceremony around submitting those
patches and features. We can say, OK, it's an open-source project so we
can just release this stuff. That's incredibly freeing for us. So we
were very happy to see them go GPL there."