sun microsystems today made the first of a few announcements toward the move of java into the open source world. i think for someone not too familiar with the open source world, but familiar with the technical religious wars between java and microsoft technologies, there may have been this assumption that java was always open source. i know speaking for myself, when i was deeply involved in development and always heard the arguments of java vs. microsoft i certainly thought it was due to the open source nature of java. since then i've become much more educated, but i still face microsoft developers who assumed that core java was open source.
well, not necessarily true...until today (partly). today sun announced to the world the first entry into the open source world for java. licensed under the GPL, you can read the announcement of the java open source project here.
now, not all of java is open-sourced just yet, with the announcement indicating to be full open source by march 2007.
why now? at least that is my thought. java has been around for 10 years. it has been embraced by the open source community since then really (or at least hasn't been met with the same vigor against it as microsoft technologies have). is this a reaction to the lure of Ruby? and the (at least perception) that java developers are moving to ruby because it is innovative where java has not been innovative in the past few years? (note: Ruby is older than Java as a language.)
it's interesting to see what will happen with this announcement. will this inject the java communities with a new burst of energy and make it a player again in innovation?
oh, and even duke was licensed under the BSD for open source use...so here you go:
