Nine years ago, I drew a line under 12 years' employment with the same blue-chip corporation and moved to the opposite end of the scale... Employee No.16 at an internet start-up. It felt like a huge decision at the time, though I was convinced that my reasons were sound. One of the factors was that I could see Java gaining huge momentum, and could also see that it wasn't being built into the corporation's solution strategy for the industry sector in which I was working. The company I moved to had an all-Java development strategy, starting with a crypto SDK and moving on to a hardened JVM, a secure Java banking client, PKI-enabling middleware and so on.
It was all great fun and a heck of a journey, and it's hard to see how I could have ended up where I am today without having taken that route. All in all, I owe a lot to Java, however indirectly.
All of which is just a rather windy preamble to today's main news - that Sun has released Java into the open-source community under a GPL. But unless I had given that introduction, you might have wondered why the hell the Esoterica had suddenly gone all product-centric.
The news seems to have gone down well with people whose judgement I tend to trust - including Mark Shuttleworth (space tourist, founder of Thawte and subsequently the Ubuntu Linux distribution, originator of the Freedom Toaster and, generally, all-round over-achiever).
As I suspect that the intersect between Esotericists and candidate Java Open Source hackers is a somewhat slim one, I'll leave it at that.
If you are, by chance, part of that slim intersect, here's the landing page for getting to the source code. You'll find separate links for the JDK, Mobile & Embedded, and Glassfish projects.
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