Linux Journal: Who Else Gains from a GPL’d Java?

“Sun’s announcement that it would be releasing Java under the
GNU GPL confounded many of its critics (including myself) who had
feared that the company was incapable of making such a bold move.
Quite rightly, it has garnered praise from across the hacker world.
But Sun’s relationship with free software has not always been so
idyllic.

“For example, Sun gave no support to Dave Miller’s port of
GNU/Linux to the SPARC platform, no doubt because it saw the young
upstart as a rival to Solaris. In a way, this antagonism is ironic,
because the spirit at Sun in the days of SunOS was remarkably close
to that of the free software world…”

Complete
Story