Ars Technica is reporting that Sun has finally made good on their promise to open up Java for the masses. This is good news for everyone - in fact, the only one whose benefit stands in question would be Sun. While I'm confidant that they will turn this to their advantage, it certainly assuages fears that trouble for Sun might mean trouble for Java - realistic fears when Sun's financials look shakier and shakier with each passing quarter. Now, if Sun goes down, they won't take Java with them.
What's prevented Java being open-sourced before (according to Sun's PR department) wasn't an issue of profitability for Java products - after all, the JVM/JRE and JDK are free, and all of their paid products are not being open sourced - it was an issue of branching. Sun was afraid that if they opened up the Java source, we'd see forks which would eventually diverge, bringing about compatibility issues; it's bad enough having to make sure that a user has the JVM/JRE installed and that they have an adequately recent version, without having to worry about which JVM they're using out of an array of options which may not all support the same features.
Personally, I think that's a rather silly fear - they need to revamp Java's dependency handling anyway, so why not take the opportunity to do so now? Instead of an application saying "I need this version of the JDK or newer", say "I need to use this library, and this one, and this one" and make sure those are available. This resolves both the issue of determining what your minimum JRE requirement need be, and the issue of diverging forks supporting different featuresets.
All in all, as a Java developer, I can't see this as anything but a Good Thing(tm).
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