Java One is in San Francisco and there has been a ton of press because Sun has re-licensed Java with the GPL2. We can’t ignore it any longer :) Java is not one of the technologies that northxsouth really uses. If you don’t know, open source software contributed to a period of sharp decline for Sun Microsystems during the dot-com crash. While Linux enjoyed over 10% growth quarter after quarter, Sun’s revenue kept plummeting. Everyone with an IT department realized that Linux offered everything that Sun offered at a substantially lower cost, both initial and maintenance. In their defense, Sun fought back and is starting to recoup their losses from that period. In the web development world, a similar effect happened, with widespread adoption of open source PHP. So, for over a year, there has been a battle within Sun for the strategy to open the source code to Java. Finally, the big announcement was made at this year’s Java One Conference, happening right now in San Francisco. They even made suggestions that open source developers should be compensated for the technology they’ve contributed to the general public. Remember that recently, Sun recruited Ian Murdock of Debian fame, who had been working at the Linux Foundation.