Why has Sun open sourced its Java implementations?
The Java platform is 13+ years in the making. When it was first released it was a radical departure for commercial software, including full source code under a novel license. Sun and the Java ecosystem have been extremely successful at establishing and growing a very large and dynamic market in this time. The Java platform retained its own licensing model even as the open-source model proliferated, because the Java licensing model successfully created a large and open market with many compatible choices. We now see an opportunity to encourage even more possibilities for adoption in places the Java platform hasn’t gone before, where Free licensing and open-source development approaches are a prerequisite for consideration. At the same time, the Free software and open-source communities have been saying that compatibility is a given for any Java implementation. And there is a new spirit of innovation with Web 2.0, SOA and collaboration/participation technologies, and the Java platform is
