Pay no attention to the lawyers behind the curtain

Chris Petrilli points to some hypocrisy at Sun with respect to their upposed championing of Open Source:

The FreeBSD Foundation, funded largely by donations from the devoted community around its open source UNIX operating system, received some bad news shortly before Christmas. Sun Microsystems has announced it is revoking FreeBSD's SCSL license, which permits the project to ship Java support with the OS.

One thing people need to keep in mind is that corporations exist to make money for their shareholders. In that light, Open Source should be seen as a tactic (and a highly successful one at at that) for firms like IBM - they have been making huge piles of service dollars while portraying themselves as "the good guys". The difference between Sun and IBM here is one of marketing acumen; IBM has it, while Sun clearly doesn't. Heck, I consider Microsoft to be refreshingly honest about Open Source - they don't like it, and they don't really make any bones about it. I like that better than the "friend of the people act" I see in IBM's advertising of Linux...