A year ago this week Sun finally bowed to pressure and agreed to make Java a free, open source project. It was an odd move given Sun's strong resistance to making Java open source for a more than a decade.

The IcedTea Project has completed a major milestone by passing the Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). What all that means is that the IcedTea Project has achieved what Sun promised to do over two years ago at JavaOne: make Java completely open-source. Red Hat's Fedora 9 will be the first Linux distribution to ship with an OpenJDK binary, and other Linux distributions will probably follow.

Ever wondered how much your contribution was worth to a project? If you are a Java developer helping out one of the hundreds of open source Java projects, head over to SourceKibitzer. It's a social network of Java developers that provides various metrics for open source Java projects.

The first GNU Classpath/Sun Java hybrids have begun to appear. The hybrids combine GNU Classpath with Java code that Sun has recently released under the GPL either to improve an existing project or to further the goal of having a completely Free JDK. First IKVM made a snapshot available, thus allowing parts of the OpenJDK class libraries to be used on Mono and .NET.

I like Jonathan Schwartz a lot, but I think that unless some drastic changes are made to Java, the move to JAVA as Sun's ticker symbol is going to be as relevant as changing it to COBOL.

Sun Microsystems last week said it will soon open source the core components of Sun Java System Web Proxy and Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 under the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. The Web and Proxy source code will be released later this year.

Sun Microsystems is to open-source the last closed-source parts of Java, a move that should make it possible to fully integrate the software into Linux distributions.

Just days after a security researcher blasted its Java patching system, Sun Microsystems has issued a critical update to the consumer version of its Java software.

Canonical has been in talks with Sun Microsystems and SpringSource to support one of their open source Java application server stacks in the Ubuntu core, to increase Ubuntu's enterprise adoption.