Open Sourcing of Java

Congratulations to the Sun guys for the open sourcing of Java, another great contribution of Sun to free software.

I blogged about this in the past, but it is worth linking to it again, as I raised what I think are some interesting points regarding the open source community and implementation of large bodies of code.

Also, from reading Slashdot today I get the impression that there is too much of zero-sum mindset, a feeling that those of us in the Mono community would not be happy about this development, which is nonsense. We are after all, free software developers. Maybe this is based on the assumption that we are competing for the same contributors, and hence a fear of scarcity prevails. I like to think that although there is some overlap, our communities are vastly different.

Or maybe it is not a zero-sum mindset, but merely a matter of rooting for the home team brought to the world of programming languages.

In any case, a big hug to all the folks involved in open sourcing Java, am sure there will be quite a lot to learn from it, and am sure distributions cant wait for the full SDK release next year.

Update: interesting post from Tim Bray and Sam Ruby on the subject.