Red Hat's blessing of Sun Java: No longer any excuse for open source developers not to use Java
Posted by Michael Harvey on November 26, 2007, 6:40 PM EST
Red Hat's recently announced support of the Sun OpenJDK project is a huge win for both the open source and Java developer communities. In the past, Sun's licensing practices kept it from being fully embraced by the open source community. To date, Sun's Java—which is obviously the gold standard—has never been included in a Linux distribution. As a result, open source developers in the past may well have adopted other languages and architectures because of this. As of today, Java comes fully into the open source mainstream. Given its technical superiority including a great security architecture and unrivaled suitability for enterprise-class applications, there is no longer any excuse for open source developers not to choose Java as their platform of choice. I suspect we will see a flood of new open source applications developed on Java. At Centric CRM, we fully embraced Java many years ago and have never regretted our choice. Today's announcement by Sun and Red Hat only increases our commitment to both the open source and Java-based paths that we are on.