More On Sun's GPL Plans

The Santa Clara, Calif., company will continue to offer its Java technologies under their current license, but is adding the GNU General Public License as an option. That is the current GPL 2 license, not the controversial GPL 3, although that option is apparently under consideration, sources said.

[Note: On Friday morning Sun spokespeople again refused comment on their Java licensing plans as they had earlier in the week when CRN broke the news .]

In short: the company will offer both commercial and GPL licenses in a hybrid model that mirrors what MySQL and companies trying to straddle the open-source/commercial software chasm have done.

With the GPL, any changes made to the core code must be submitted back to the open-source community for review and possible inclusion in future releases. A hybrid license allows developers to maintain control over their changes and restrict their use. For a good explanation of the GPL, see this ZDNet blog.

One major advantage to Sun's new plan will be that Java code can now legally be distributed on-disk with any Linux distribution, sources said. Before now that Java code had to be on separate disks because of licensing differences.

Sun has been a holdout on the GPL, withstanding pressure form several powerful Java partners. Many developers and others had clamored for a GPL concession. When CRN reported the news on this change of plans earlier this week time it was not clear that Sun would continue to license Java as it has in the past, although that was deemed likely.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz publicly toyed with the idea of GPL'ing Java in his blog last May.

One Boston-area Java developer was surprised at the news, but said Sun had to change its ways.

"Java gets dismissed in the open source world for lots of reasons, one of the more valid ones is that it's not open source. Red Hat and some other Linux distributions don't include Java for this reason. Python and Ruby are open source, and they generally are installed by default," he noted.

He also said this move could be a response to the Apache group's Harmony project, an open-source, clean-room Java implementation.