Hoping to win the hearts and minds of millions of internet programmers, the giants of the software industry are starting to sing a new song: Free your software and developers will follow.
Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems and even Microsoft are starting to embrace the ideals of the open-source software movement, releasing software under liberal licenses in a bid to dominate the next-generation web.
At this week's JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, Sun said it will open-source its JavaFX Script programming language later this year -- a bold step for a company that has traditionally been slow to dive into the open-software arena. Meanwhile, Adobe has released open-source programming tools for its competing Flash technology, and Microsoft, the beast of Redmond, has released code for Silverlight, it's Flash killer, under its own liberal license.
Microsoft embracing open source? Really?