May 8th, 2007
Happy Sun Day
My best friend in England is a fan of the soccer team Sheffield Wednesday, which plays most games on Saturday.
So despite this being Tuesday, I hereby proclaim it Sun Day. As in Sun Microsystems.
Fulfilling the promises of CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun today released new versions of its Java Development Kit (OpenJDK) and Java platform (Java SE) under the GPLv2. They also introduced an interim governing board for the OpenJDK community.
This is a big day. It was one thing for IBM to commit to open source. It was something else for Sun to say it would go open source. But now Sun has done just that, and under a FOSS license. Everyone party like it's 1995, and please don't tell James Gosling he's 12 years older. (There's a reason middle-aged executives meet the press in business suits instead of t-shirts.)
The aim of all this is to gain more clout in the mobile space through JavaFX, a simplified scripting language it also announced today, and to gain more market traction Sun can use to make money on services. But speaking personally I like to see people make money. It gives me the warm hope of more work.
Now for the big questions.
What are you going to build with it? What do you want to see built first? And who is going to do the first O'Reilly book on the new Java?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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