Last week, it all finally came together.

Just under a year after Rich Green announced that Sun would open-source its Java SE Development Kit, we delivered on that promise.

It’s been an amazing year of transformation within Sun, and a year of incredibly hard work on the part of many. In spite of numerous obstacles, some thrown at us in just the last couple of months, the JDK team managed to pull off one of the largest contributions of open-source code ever made and also laid what will, we hope, prove to be a strong foundation for the long-term success of the community interested in that code.

I’d like here to highlight the work of those in the engineering team who’ve done the most over the last six months to keep us on course and, ultimately, land the plane safely and on time—though perhaps with more smoke and sparks streaming out of the engines than one might like. In no particular order:

• Kelly O’Hair, master build architect, who reshaped the JDK source trees and build system to cleanly separate open-source from encumbered code, helped other teams migrate code from one side of the wall to the other (and sometimes back), and did so while peering into the future to make sure that the end result will make sense when we switch from TeamWare to Mercurial.

• Phil Race, grumpy graphics guy, who worked with the legal team to figure out exactly which parts of the 2D code are encumbered and led the efforts of his team to carve out that code, start thinking about free replacements, and actually integrate one—a littlecms-based implementation of the java.awt.color package—into the code base.

• Xiomara Jayasena, lead traffic controller, who oversaw all the builds and integrations during this critical time and kept us from stepping on each others’ toes.

• David Katleman, curator of copyrights, who made sure that all the C’s and R’s are properly capitalized, that the date ranges in copyright notices are correct, and who did the largest JDK code integration I’ve ever seen: 21,287 files updated.

• Iris Clark, doyenne of detail, who first helped lead the charge on auditing regression tests and then, two weeks before the big announcement at JavaOne, took on the monumental task of re-analyzing every single source file per the legal team’s most recent instructions and coordinated the work of the engineers, volunteer and otherwise, who helped implement them.

• Martin Buchholz, Jonathan Gibbons, and Brad Wetmore, bulk editors of code, who made quick work of modifying the legal notices of thousands of files that they’d never seen before, and probably hope never to see again. Jonathan also helped out with some of the late-breaking legal analysis and with other details such as version differentiation.

• Dave Bristor, NetBeans projectizer, who led the effort to create NetBeans project metadata for various interesting slices of the JDK, thereby helping to make our contributors more productive.

• Jeff Dinkins, slinger of HTML, and Tim Bell, tamer of Postfix, who in two weeks migrated our static HTML content and mailing lists from openjdk.dev.java.net to our new home at openjdk.java.net.

• Madhura Dudhgaonkar, queen of quality, who pushed back when needed but was otherwise as flexible as possible.

• Carla Schroer, general counsel and overall voice of sanity, who helped interpret the legal tea leaves, ran interference at higher levels, and worked deep magic at the very last minute so that our rich collection of licenses would mesh well together in spite of their complexity.

This is not, of course, an exhaustive list—many others, too numerous to mention, made significant contributions over the last year.

To all: My deepest thanks.