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.

The claim that .Net is a multiplatform standard is rendered false: .NET developers are further locked into a single vendor. Java, in contrast, is fully open source and has the developer community.

What has happened in the year since Sun Microsystems released the source code for Java? While end users might be starting to wonder, those most involved in the building of the free Java community describe a thriving community that, after one year, is still working hard to reinvent itself.

Red Hat has signed on to participate in Sun Microsystems' open-source Java Standard Edition (SE) project, OpenJDK, and to coordinate its own Java development efforts for Linux with the project.

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.

At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology.

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.

Increasing number of software applications are going the free/open-source way these days. Looks like more and more software companies and developers have seen the barriers of closed-source programs and have now fully realized the significance of freedom.