On Monday, Sun Microsystems did what designers, coders, and open-source advocates have long wished for in backrooms and cried out for in public: Sun has released Java to the open-source world under the GNU General Public License.
The GPL, as it's commonly referred to, is the license used by much of the open-source world's brightest lights, including Linux  and MySQL.
Java is every bit as popular as those two platforms, ranking among the world's premier programming languages and currently in use in billions of computers, cell phones, and a blinding array of gadgets from the medical to the personal.
Sun developed Java more than 10 years ago as way to write software that could be written once, yet run on machines of nearly any stripe.
"It took Sun a long time to get where we are today," said Chris Swenson, director of software analysis at the NPD Group, "but I think it's promising."
Boon for Business?
Forrester Research senior analyst Michael Goulde said Sun's move will not have an instant payoff for the average business, but that it will give companies "a more feature-rich platform" in the long term, as more and more developers are drawn to using it under the open-source license.
In fact, NPD's Swenson said he believes that courting software developers -- and thus expanding Java's range and ultimate market penetration -- might have been one of Sun's principal motives.
"It's good, because they need to keep the momentum going for Java," he said. "They need to keep developers in the Java camp."
Major Milestone
Prior to Sun's announcement, which some have called a major moment in the history of open source, programmers exclusively using open-source languages could rely on any number of popular options, such as PHP or Perl, each of which is widely used on the Internet.
Java, in contrast, is not only used online -- to power Web sites and billions of e-commerce transactions -- but also is employed in electronics that run the gamut from consumer goods to business handhelds.
With Monday's announcement, Sun gave the open-source world a jolt of caffeine; now, it has to find a way to profit from Java's newly broadened appeal.
"It's hard to figure out the right recipe in the open-source world," said NPD's Swenson, who noted that turning a profit and pleasing cost-conscious developers is a challenge. To them, he said, "free is the new cheap."
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