Diego Berrueta

(This is a reprint of the original post)

Big news today: Sun has open sourced the mayor components of Java. (Part of) The source code is available under the GPL. Of course, there are some gray areas on this matter, but in general terms, I feel happy. For the free software community, I think this is one of the most important movements ever, maybe the most strategic one. The release of Mozilla and OpenOffice as open source was important, but they held a small share of the market at the moment of their release, while Java is the biggest development platform today for enterprise software. Of course, there were already some free implementations of Java (gjc, jikes, sablevm, GNU classpath...), but unfortunately, they are a step behind the "official" Java software from Sun. Now, we can have a full free Java stack on servers everywere: an up-to-date free JVM and the excellent Java software from Apache, JBoss, Eclipse...