Sun Microsystems is the latest company to become a patron of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The FSF's corporate patron program allows companies to provide financial sponsorship for the FSF in return for free license consulting services. High-profile FSF patron affiliates include prominent technology companies like Google, Nokia, IBM, Cisco, and Intel. FSF involvement represents Sun's latest attempt to take a more active role in the open-source software community.

Over the years, Sun's position on the FSF's GPL license has changed many times. In 2004, when Sun first considered adopting the GPL, Jonathan Schwartz said that the company viewed "the GPL as a friend." A year later, Schwartz expressed a very different opinion when he condemned the GPL and characterized its share-alike clauses as a "predatory obligation" and "intellectual property colonialism."

Sun officially put an end to the flip-flopping last year, when the company finally released its Java programming language under the GPL. Sun representatives have also expressed interest in potentially dual-licensing OpenSolaris to make it available under the GPL as well as the company's own CDDL license. Now that Sun has liberated the source code of its two flagship products, it seems clear that the company is willing to practice what it preaches. Sun's newly-announced support for the FSF tells us that Sun's GPL adoption isn't just another passing phase for the company.

Sun's interest in the GPL3, an upcoming revision of the GPL, probably played a role in the company's decision to become more involved with the FSF. At present, developers of the Linux kernel do not intend to transition to the GPL3. If Sun adopts the GPL3 for OpenSolaris and the Linux kernel remains with current version of the license, it could potentially stimulate the growth of the OpenSolaris community and help Sun attract community contributors who are ideologically aligned with the FSF.