Via James Gosling, evidently the J2SE team is now publishing weekly builds of Tiger (J2SE v1.5). This is huge.

Although at this point the usefulness of such openness is fairly limited (Tiger is well past its initial public beta, and is currently in stabilization mode), this is a subtle - but nonetheless important - indication that Sun is learning a few lessons from Microsoft's continued focus on the development community. Mark Reinhold, Chief Engineer for J2SE, admits that their primary motivation is quality of the final release, in particular to "increase the level of external testing and thereby improve the quality of the final result." He also draws comparison to the "release early, release often" methodology adopted by most Open Source projects, although I don't find that this analogy travels very far.

What's interesting is that there is no mention of incorporating (or encouraging) community feedback earlier in project release cycles when it matters most. James does say that "if it works well, we'd like to continue in subsequent release cycles." It's not clear, however, what specifically this would entail. Still encouraging, nonetheless.

I firmly believe that - in general - the more involvement from the community, the better the end result. More feedback during the stabilization period will translate into a more stable product - one would hope - which benefits both Sun and the community. Similarly, incorporating community feedback into other areas of the product design would likely lend a hand to product richness and quality. I would bet there's a lot of learning to be had regarding the best means by which to build products collaboratively with the respective communities - both for Sun and Microsoft. I also wonder if the ability to master such a process will be a significant differentiating feature for development platforms down the road.

I think this is a great move by Sun, one which is slightly contradictory to their historical strangle hold on the Java development process, a view into which was previously only available via the JCP. I can't wait to see how this new policy matures.

The future is definitely a great place to be for developers.