Sun Microsystems has lost a key individual responsible for getting its aspiring open-source software included in leading Linux distributions.

Barton George has quit Sun after 13 years, hard on the heels of having helped secure the inclusion of an open-source friendly version of Sun's Java Development Kit (JDK) - OpenJDK - with major GNU/Linux distros.

OpenJDK is now included in Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04LTS, OpenSUSE 11, and Debian's forthcoming Lenny and is available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and CentOS 5. In earlier work, Sun's open-source NetBeans development environment was added to versions of Ubuntu.

Having open-source-friendly versions of Java and Sun's middleware ship with Linux has been a major plank in Sun's software strategy for the last few years.

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