There are any number of very good reasons why Sun open-sourced Java, but there are always wrinkles. Among them is the loss of control for the central “authority” of the language — Sun, the JCP, what have you. At first blush, this is bad mostly for the control freaks at said central authority, and why should we care about their hang-ups, right? If they wanted to keep everything under control, they shouldn’t have open-sourced it.On the other hand, if Java is open source, we could have a lot of different things out there that could have a reasonable claim to be Java, and that can be a little bewildering for the programmer. For instance, on his blog Sun’s David Herron put up a little primer on the somewhat confusing relationship between OpenJDK 6, OpenJDK 7, and the IcedTea project — which was itself dense enought to merit exegesis from InfoQ.In other open source news — Sun is no doubt pleased to be put into the category of “open source company” by major publications, but probably would have preferred to have been left out of Cnet’s “Which open-source companies to go under?” Software DevelopmentOpen SourceJava