In 2004 Eric Raymond wrote an open letter to Sun Microsystems' then chief executive officer Scott McNealy demanding Sun open up their core Java intellectual property and allow anyone do whatever they damn well please with it.

That other pillar of open source, and creator of the GNU Project Richard Stallman, meanwhile, became one of Java's loudest opponents - sternly advising people not to install the closed-source evil that was Java, and giving Java as a dire example of corporate lock-in.

Two years later Sun silenced the the baying crowd with OpenJDK - an open-source project based on Sun's closed-JDK codebase.

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