Apparently, Sun Microsystems, the people behind Java, are planning some kind of open source ‘briefing’ on the 15th August in which they will allegedly announce that the Java platform will be open source.

This might not sound like a big deal – we’ve seen a lot of Sun products going open source recently, including their operating system Solaris, and the OpenOffice.org project (formerly Star Office), but this will make a big impact for Linux on the desktop.

Because of legal and licensing issues, the Java software can’t be distributed with most Linux distributions, as it’s not open source and Sun’s licence is too restrictive. The open sourcing of Java will in theory mean Java will come as standard on new versions of Linux distributions (and will be easy to install on current distributions) opening Linux on the desktop up to a lot of Java-based open source software. In fact, Aptana, which we have looked at here on Gizbuzz, runs on Java and although there is a Linux version, it requires a somewhat daunting Java installation to run.

This move should prevent that and ultimately make Linux a more attractive desktop platform. It makes business sense for Sun too – they’ve got a director of open source, Simon Phipps, who is pushing Sun’s open source initiative.