The dust is still settling from this morning's announcement. Aside from the story being picked up by every tech news site out there, it also unleashed a blogging storm on both blogs.sun.com, and the rest of the blogosphere. Yes I'm talking about Sun open sourcing Java (under the GPL no less).

Not to be left out, let me just say that this is absolutely the right move and will prove to be a win-win-win for Sun, the Java community, and the entire open source community (all of which are not mutually exclusive). Personally, I think the biggest gain is summed up in this piece from Jonathan's blog:

The GPL is the same license used to manage the evolution of GNU/Linux - in choosing the GPL, we've opened the door to comingling the communities, and the code itself.

The whole idea of Java grew out of the "write once, run anywhere" mentality. However, when the platform used to run applications is a closed, proprietary system, conflicts of interest crop up everywhere. Granted, the JVM was always free, and the source code was never really secret, but licensing incompatibilities restricted some groups (such as many Linux distributions) from bundling Java as part of its system. Thus there was a wall separating two otherwise completely compatible communities.

Today Sun has taken down that wall. It is now up to the open source community to explore the potential benefits that can be gained.