Sun Joins Free Software Foundation

Sun Microsystems has become a "patron" of the Free Software Foundation, joining the likes of HP, IBM, Google and MySQL. The announcement was made over the weekend at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels, and follows Sun's decision to license Java under the GPL.

"Sun and the FSF have been promoting software freedom add this to the recent announcement that the Java platform will be licensed under the GPL, and it becomes obvious that the connections must be stronger," said Sun's chief open source officer Simon Phipps. The FSF was founded by Richard Stallman and is credited for helping start the open source software movement.