A little more than two years ago, in November 2006, Sun announced the Open Sourcing of the Java development language. At the time, Sun was pressured by the user community and by companies with large investments in Java tools and applications, like IBM and BEA.
Two years later, the main difference seems to be that tensions between Sun and the Java community have dropped to levels of cordiality.
Beyond that, not much has changed. Sun had voiced worries that Open Sourcing Java may cause the language to be forked, possibly alluding to and early-on attemp by Microsoft attempt to hijack Java by creating the copy-cat J++/J# language.
At least there haven’t been really any negatives to the switch. Some pluses that have come out of the switch to Open Source include:
- Easier to bundle, package and ship
- More transparency when debugging code
- Greater access and acceptability to more people
Rod Johnson, creator of the Java Spring Framework commented that “We think that Sun open sourcing Java is a good thing, but we also think with the language itself, Sun was already doing a fairly good job running it.”
The direction of the language has not changed much and Sun still wields ultimate control over how the language will change, although the number of Java Specification Requests (JSRs) are way up.
