Java and open source: I read this piece from Bruce Peren's now defunct Technocrat.net, where Bruce Perens talks about the very lively work done on Open Source J2EE development by people involved in JBoss, Xerces and Jakarta, and the interesting work done on truly open source JDK environments. The thrust of the comments are that the open source JDK environments are not competative with the closed source alternatives, and the development effort is not going in the right direction. My immediate reaction is - it's true and it's depressing.

On the other hand it is good to see that at least a few people see there is a problem. I think one reason for the relatively unenthusiatic adoption of GNU CLASSPATH is the unclear licensing around it: instead of the reasonably well-understood LGPL license, it is mostly licensed under a special GPL-with-exception, whic pretty much amounts to LGPL, but the differences appear nowhere to be made perfectly clear. Anyone who remembers the GNU crusade against KDE will justifiably be suspicious.