Having been led to believe that future versions of the Mac OS X native GUI’d Java programming language might just be remote possibilities, it now turns out that Apple is more than willing to release its current Java JDK code to Oracle/Sun, including, most importantly, its Aqua-based GUI code.

This means that future versions of the Java programming language will STILL be available for the Mac and that these versions will maintain a Mac-native GUI look-and-feel, and NOT fall back on a non-Mac X11 display.

Another potentially positive side-effect might be that Java releases on the Mac may not lag behind other releases quite as much as they have done, previously.

Part of Apple’s reasoning on working with Oracle’s OpenJDK might be to throw more weight behind Oracle’s patent infringement case aimed at Google’s modifications to the Java language within their Android-based Dalvik Java bytecode conversion layer.