Seeking to leverage the power of social media and online collaboration, on Nov 13th Sun Microsystems announced that Java is going open source (here’s the Wikipedia definition of open source, FYI). They’ve created an online collaboration space for developers and bought ads all over the Internet trumpeting the move (that’s how I finally clued in). And why not? Instead of having a development community of a few dozen engineers, why not make it a few thousand, or a million? As discussed previously, Firefox did it with marketing… and it works.