What Sun finally did this week by releasing Java under GPL was a historic event. Using the GPL instead of yet another Sun license certainly makes adoption that much easier. But why did it take so long and why the change now?
I left Sun in 2004 after 8 fun years at Javasoft. Open Source Java was a annual discussion at Sun and in many conversations with open source advocates and companies. Many of the engineers I knew were for open sourcing Java as long as the motivation wasn't just to simply reduce headcount in engineering. However each proposal got shot down somewhere in the approval process. There were theories on how, who, why but ultimately the result was the same, at best a small compromise in the license but still no open source Java.