"...And the verdict is Erlang is much more efficient than Java in process/thread creation and message communication I had to actually explicitly reduce the stack size to run Java program, but there is no comparison..."

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.

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.

"...Java is the new COBOL, whaaaat?[...]I believe that the 'Java is the new COBOL' is a politically correct way for saying "Java sucks"[...] I have been reading a lot about Richard Stallman, the free software advocate. He has one central theme that he uses to defend his free software movement; free software is not about the developers, it is about the users.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"We are happy to be working with Microsoft on a license for the Java technology and look forward to working with them on optimizing the Java technology for Windows," Sun said in an official release.