“Q. After years of resisting, why is Sun making Java
open source now?“A. Sun made its core software product, the
Solaris operating system, open source and thinks that’s working.
Customers still buy Solaris and sign up for support. That was
Schwartz’s main goal when he was chief operating officer of Sun,
before becoming CEO in April. Open source Java would attract more
developers, a win for the larger Java community in its competition
with Microsoft and its .Net environment. It also addresses a
tension: Each time Sun asserts ownership of Java, some in the Java
community, including IBM, get restless…”