Relax, care for some IcedTea :)

Relax, care for some IcedTea :)

Freeing their own code is an attack on those projects. How, exactly, is that supposed to imply a desire to work with the Free Software, excuse me, the Open Source community? If they really cared to join, they could use a license that's compatible with those projects, so code could be freely exchanged with them.

And that is precisely what they did. The used the GPL (plus the GNU Classpath exception for selected libraries) as used by almost all the libre java efforts out there (except Harmony, but that is another story, you cannot blame them for the mistakes made by the ASF). Look at IcedTea, the mixup of gcj, GNU Classpath and OpenJDK, for a fun collaboration project. This allows all the GNU/Linux distros to ship OpenJDK as completely Free Software. Recently Planet Classpath and PlanetJDK mashed together. Sun hired one of the prominent Kaffe and GNU Classpath hackers, Dalibor Topic, to help them make all this a success. Yes, all this isn't easy on either community, and yes, Sun does think they deserve some control, but all the code is out there, and everybody is respecting the GPL and the fun experiments that come from that. Yes, there are now multiple code bases out there, which you might call a shame, it was a lot of work. We cannot change that fact, but those code bases and communities can and do intermingle.

There is an older LWN article, Piecing together free java , describing some of the ups and downs of the new libre java world (disclaimer I wrote that and I am the GNU Classpath maintainer).

Indeed, Sun's handling of Java was a definite improvement, even if it was several years later
than it should have been.

If only they would have handled the opening of the Solaris code in the same fashion... :/