Today the New York Times story about how Jonathan Schwartz has decided Sun Microsystems will be releasing an Open Source version of java (see story here). I have a few friends that were laid off in the past few years from Sun Microsystems and I'm sure most folks know the company isn't doing too well these days. Apparently Sun is going to try and move to more of a service organization as IBM has over the past few years.

Releasing Java as Open Source is something most developers have wanted for a longtime. The one argument I've heard against this happening was that there would be the possibility of the Java language splintering. I don't think that is going to happen since Java is so well established right now.

Hopefully this will lead to Java being adopted even more. One area I'd like to see more of Java is in the major Linux distros. Right now many distros ship with a version of Java I don't feel comfortable working with overall
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