Not sure I follow you. Most desktops are some flavor of Windows, call it +90%. What piece of technology, not present previously, became ubiquitous on Windows once it was open sourced? Open sourcing java doesn't mean much for end users on the desktop, imo.
The commercial open sourcing of java will matter on the ecosystem and it's a good thing for java developers (which, despite HN demographics, there are still millions of). Particularly, when you consider the flaws of the JCP and Sun's control to this point.
Good going Sun indeed--stick to making awesome hardware.
Now that it's absolutely trivial to distribute, developers can count on the same code base everywhere. Kind of like how everyone can count on GCC.
I don't write much Java now but at one time I supported a database library on runtimes from sun, ibm, apple, microsoft and the blackdown guys. It was crazy. Java and Python have been around for about the same amount of time. Python has about 5 different VM implementations. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines Java has 10 times that number.
The commercial open sourcing of java will matter on the ecosystem and it's a good thing for java developers (which, despite HN demographics, there are still millions of). Particularly, when you consider the flaws of the JCP and Sun's control to this point.
Good going Sun indeed--stick to making awesome hardware.