You want to fork the OpenJDK. If you don’t care about calling it Java, you can, under copyright law and the GPLv2, just cut the release, publish it, and go about your business. The catch is that there are tons of patents all over the JVM, and the GPLv2 does not include any patent protections.

Respected Free Software lawyer, Eben Moglen and the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Centre ) have sent a letter to the European Commission saying that it believes that the Commission has "underestimated the robustness the GPL has consistently demonstrated".

So I talked about licenses. And license obligations. And interesting bits of the GPL version 2. There’s one clause of the GPL version 2 that I’d like to single out because it’s one that is surprising to me — and rarely mentioned. Clause 6.

"There has been a lot of press coverage about the Microsoft/TomTom settlement. Unfortunately, so far, I have seen no one speak directly about the dangers that this deal could pose to software freedom, and what our community should consider in its wake. Karen and I discussed some of these details on our podcast, but I thought it would be useful to have a blog post about this issue as well..."

"...This is a guide to effective compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and related licenses. In accordance with the Software Freedom Law Center’s (SFLC’s) philosophy of assisting the community with GPL compliance cooperatively, this guide focuses on avoiding compliance actions and minimizing the negative impact when enforcement actions occur.

RMS: «If Microsoft says that ['era of open computing'], it appears to be an attempt at a self-fulfilling prophesy. If people believe it, they may make it come true. The way to deal with that is to refuse to let Microsoft lead you. Pay attention to your freedom instead of self-serving forecasts ...

EnterpriseDB plans to announce Tuesday that it is open-sourcing GridSQL, its grid product for data warehousing and business intelligence applications, under the GPLv2 license. GridSQL, and products like it, allow users to scale up database performance by adding more servers to a grid configuration, and then running queries in parallel across the pool.

Ohloh, a community site for open source developers, is making its tools open source, including the Web site itself.