FLOSS Java
Mark Shuttleworth founder of Twarte, Canonical Ltd and The Ubuntu Foundation (which distributed the popular Ubuntu Linux) comments on his blog regarding the open sourcing of Java following from Sun license changes that make it easier to distribute the JRE with Linux. Mark was presumably involved in the license change as he was wheeled out on stage during the announcement at JavaOne. Also at JavaOne it was stated that it wasn’t a case of if Java would be open sourced but when.
Sadly, for personal reasons, I couldn’t make JavaOne this year so I wasn’t there to hear the keynotes but having read reports from the keynotes it isn’t immediately clear what they intending to open. The licensing term changes only effect the JRE (the software that let’s you run Java applications but not create them) however there are numerous pieces to the Java Platform, there is of course the JDK (which allows you to create Java apps), the Language Specification, Java EE, Java ME, the Byte Code Specification and on and on.
Anyway Mark has some interesting thoughts on this and also the damage that has been caused by not Open Sourcing Java 5 years ago.