Matt Raible tipped be off about a javablogger event at the Thirsty Bear at 5.30, where I ended up talking to Simon Phipps, responsible for open source at Sun. I asked him about todays announcement that Java will, one day, be made open source. My main concern is that Microsoft could pick up the source and ship it with every version of Windows, slowly tweaking it to run well only on thier OS. He said they wouldn't be able to do that unless it passed the TCK (i.e. the test suite that certifies a Java release to be compliant to the JSR (the spec)). Assuming he was correct, I then asked him what would happen if Microsoft grabbed the source and shipped it as described above, only calling it Banana instead of Java. He was pretty confident even that would be against the license. So, what license would be picked? He believed it might work with GPL (but perhaps he said LGPL - it was a noisy and really crowded bar, and I'm not expert enough to directly rule out what just can't be right).
So, what do I think? I think there is still significant risk in the last scenario, so I'd have to study the whole thing a bit motre to be totally reassured.