“Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes might have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause. Mars, it appears, has also been experiencing milder temperatures in recent years. In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide ‘ice caps’ near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.”

• Slashdot | Sun May Be Warming Both Earth and Mars

So it finally happened, Sun relicensed Java to the GNU Public License (GPL), the most widely used Open Source license.
I welcome this move and look forward to seeing where it will take the Java and open software in general.

According to the theserverside.com: ” The rumors have been confirmed by Sun: Java is going to be released in full under the GPL v2. The initial plan is to release Hotspot and the javac compiler under the GPL v2, with the rest of Java to follow in the first half of 2007. Java EE will also be opened under the GPL, as well as J2ME. The Java specification will remain under the control of the JCP.

The GPLed components will be hosted in the JDK communities on dev.java.net. Initial components (javac and Hotspot, as well as Javahelp) are from the Java 7 codebase, as Java 6 is almost entirely finished; Java 6 will eventually be put under the GPL as time permits.

The key behind moving to the GPL is to drive more volume and more adoption for the platform. The GPL helps get Java into some markets that it hasn’t served as fully as it should - such as educational markets, governments in the developing world, and some commercial customers - as well as, obviously, some distributions of Linux which insist not on Linux-friendly licenses but on actual GPL licensing.

GPLv2 was chosen over GPLv3 for fairly obvious reasons: GPLv3 isn’t finished yet! Sun is, they said, working with the FSF on defining GPLv3.”

• The Serverside: Sun relicenses Java under GPL
• Slashdot: Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL
• CW.dk: Sun slipper Java fri som open source

NetBeans — My favorite Java / J2EE development environment, har just been released in version 5.0, much have changed since the 3.x, 4.x versions and I warmly recommend any Java developer to download and discover it’s open source glory, especially those who last tried it years ago.
I went from NetBeans 3.1 to JBuilder Enterprise and directly back to NetBeans 3.6 again, and since I haven’t really looked at the commercial IDE’s as an option for my own projects. I have also used Eclipse and IBM’s Websphere Studio Developer (which is based on Eclipse codebase), and although they are fine products, they don’t really do it for me, since I have quite big focus on Java Web Development, and Eclipse needs commercial third party plugins (MyEclipse) to do that well at the moment.

NetBeans IDE 5.0 introduces comprehensive support for developing IDE modules and rich client applications based on the NetBeans platform, the new intuitive GUI builder Matisse, new and redesigned CVS support, Sun Application Server 8.2, Weblogic9 and JBoss 4 support, and a lot of editor enhancements.

Here are some of the cool features in this release:

• Developing NetBeans Modules
• Matisse GUI Builder
• Servers
• Web Frameworks
• Web Services
• Editor Enhancements
• Code Completion
• Refactoring
• Version Control
• Debugging
• Other Usability Improvements
• New NetBeans Add-on Packs

• NetBeans 5.0 Release Info