Java goes GPL, and that's a real bombshell news from Sun. Many people have been commenting this around, and here is my point of view about this historical announcement.

  • Java will be easy to redistribute, that's great.
  • Java will be ported to more operating systems out of the box (ex: FreeBSD) and that's even greater.
  • The GNU fanboys will finally stop whining about Java beeing evil.
  • The GNU fanboys will probably start to realize that Sun contributes a lot of open source software (OpenSolaris, OpenOffice.org, ZFS and now Java).
  • Projects like KDE will probably start integrating Java more seriously.
  • The choice of the GPL license does make sense for Sun, although I have personnaly come to prefer lax licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache) and middle-ground licenses (MPL, CDDL).
  • I hope that it won't kill the CDDL license that Sun has developed.
  • I hope that Sun won't move to the GPL v3 unless the FSF significantly rewrites it.