Sun announced that Java is now Open Sourced. It’s business as usual to the rest of the 4m Java developers. All we (yeah!) care is when I write “java” on the command line, the new version of Java has all the required classes to complete that task.
What I fear from this open-sourcing is hundreds of forks doing their own thing and going the route of Unix and Linux. Choice is good, confusion is not — In the end, RedHat, SuSe, etc. are making money on the work done by 100s of open source developers. Although, proprietary forks are not possible due to GPL v2, what we can clearly see is that multiple options would lead to non-concentrated effort in VM optimization and future development. Will the Open Sourcing lead to incompatibilities? Only time will tell.
The biggest winner from this initiative would be availability of Java RPMs and packages for installation on Linux straight from vendors and community supported distros. Right now, it’s a pain installing Java on Debian.