Further thoughts on the GPLing of Java today:
Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green are no Steve Jobs, though they were trying. I simply zoned out through most of their presentation. Even their "one more thing" (open sourcing Duke) had in fact been announced on this site hours earlier. I think I read it on some Sun employee's blog somewhere. If that employee worked for Apple, they'd have been escorted off the premises by now.
Solaris may soon be GPL'd as well. Sun is considering that. This would be a good thing. License proliferation is a pain.
Apparently the Novell-Microsoft deal annoyed Sun so much that they chose the GPL out of spite at the last minute. Thanks Microsoft!
One thing I'd love to see come out of this is a more open bug database. Lord knows Bugzilla isn't an ideal system but at least Eclipse, Mozilla and other open source projects that use it let you see what you've submitted and comment on and update the reports. I just submitted a bug involving POSTing with the HttpURLConnection classes and 301 redirects, but I can't link to the bug report yet; and I can't expand on my report until they've reviewed it, even though something else relevant just occurred to me.
It's a shame the Java class where the bug appeared isn't open source yet, because this particular bug actually falls smack in the middle of my expertise. Thus it's exactly the sort of bug I could and would submit a patch for given the opportunity.
It takes a while to turn a ship, though. There's more to making a project open source than merely changing the license, and I think Sun knows that. Bug tracking's just part of it. They've got fifteen years of proprietary build systems, code formatting, contracts, and other details to straighten out, and this won't happen over night. However, I'm now confident that it will happen. That's a very good thing. Kudos all around to Sun. I haven't been this excited about Java in years.