Ted Neward has a piece at O’ReillyNet suggesting that Sun free Swing — turning it over to the Jakarta project. I would tend to agree that Swing is not core to Sun’s strategy, and Sun could also assign as many developers as it liked to the project. Furthermore, there are plenty of companies built in whole or in part around producing Java GUI apps. I imagine that they could improve both the performance and usability of those apps if they were able to both contribute changes to Swing and to edit Swing themselves to improve their products. The pace of innovation for other open GUI platforms (like KDE and Gnome) has been very impressive. I think Swing would evolve more rapidly if it were open. Would it cost Sun even a dollar in revenue to open it?