“Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO. Sun Microsystems was purchased by Oracle around one year ago. This purchase became either expanding opportunity for some developers; or it changed into predicament s for others developers.

For example in November, Apple® and Oracle announced the open source OpenJDK project for Mac OS® X. Later, IBM agreed to join on this project as well.  “We are excited to welcome Apple as a significant contributor in the growing OpenJDK community,” said Hasan Rizvi, Oracle’s senior vice president of Development. Apple will be providing a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client. Oracle in return will provide Mac OS X with Java SE 7 and future version of Java to Apple.

However, the purchase of Sun Microsystems might not always be a plus for every company. For instance, Oracles sued Google for breaching the open source licenses. Google uses Java platform for development of their android mobile phone. Google claimed that, “We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Google and the open source Java community with this baseless lawsuit.”

Whether it is good or bad, there might be possible legality changes with many services that depend on open source Java in 2011.

Source: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/11/12openjdk.html

Source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/oracle-attacks-opensource/