2006年 Nov 15日 Wednesday, 8:37
From Sun's Web site:
Sun Opens Java13.November.2006—Sun believes deeply in creating communities and sharing innovations and technologies to foster more participation. Today in a historic move, Sun is opening the door to greater innovation by open sourcing key Java implementations—Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME), and Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE)—under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), the same license as GNU/Linux. » Read more.
Sun has just become a full-fledged member of the free software community with this news. I can imagine that the FSF will be retracting their suggestion to stay away from Java now. A mere memory will be the days when users of free operating systems have to mini miracles just to get Java working on their OS of choice. Might this now spell the end of gcj?
In the third video embedded on the initial announcement page, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media states, "the choice of GPL, I think, is really going to rock some people back; it's a bold move, and it's one that's going to have a lot of far-reaching consequences. For starters, it means that Java will get incorporated into 'Linux' distributions like Ubuntu, which are very much focused around the GPL and the like. That will harness, I think, a large group well beyond the core Java community. It also means that these communities that feel very strongly about completely free and open licenses are going to take another look at Java."
I couldn't have said it better myself.