Last November, Sun announced the creation of the OpenJDK project and community, which stemmed from it’s initial claim in May 2006 that it would GPL Java.

From what it looks like, Sun is basically making due on it’s promise. Richard Stallman claims that this is one of the biggest contributions to the Free Software Foundation, ever.

In terms of code base, at over six million lines of code, sure, Java is gigantic. But in terms of who cares about what, do open source developers really care that Java is around? Personally, I do not.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that Sun is opening the Java source, but for the same reason I think any open source platform is great: the more GPL software, the better. I question Sun’s motives for doing so. Maybe I don’t even have to, maybe it’s clear to everyone that Sun is opening Java’s source because Java is dying - because that’s what is happening.

Java developers hate it when you point out that Java is slow. Well, Java is slow, and no amount of bickering or name calling is going to change that. Java hogs memory, much more memory than it seems it should. Is it possible that open source developers can provide remedies for these issues? In theory, it seems possible. Is it likely to happen?

Will a huge open source following emerge around Java? Time will tell. But personally I’ll trade the write once run anywhere philosophy for a nice, clean, fully functional .NET implementation any day of the week (except Sunday, I’m off on Sunday).