Sun opened Java in the most elegant way of doing it (imho): the licence is the GPL. This move was analysed and commented by many people. Even some important Open Source/Free Software players gave their comments on a Sun website. Unfortunately, their comments are only available in a proprietary video format.
You can now have access to audio recordings of these interviews (Brian Behlendorf, Paul Cormier, Eben Moglen, Tim O’Reilly, Mark Shuttleworth, Richard Stallman and Dr. Marcelo K. Zuffo), to a text transcript and even to SHA1 sums of the audio files!
Jean-Etienne's blog 