Dalibor Topic, lead Kaffe developer and Classpath contributor, was recently interviewed about the decision by Sun to open-source Java. He talks about how he is pleased with Sun's decision and how they're implementing it and how he thinks that Kaffe, GCJ, etc will continue to thrive.
Topic says that he was very happy when Sun released Java under the GPL. He is also impressed how they've gone about it.
I'm very pleased with Sun's execution of it all so far. For example, they've been very responsive to resolve questions about the licensing model from Java community members, who may not be familiar with the way the GPL or the Classpath exception works. They've done a great job on the FAQ for the OpenJDK project.
Topic has looked over some of the code and while he has found a few small compiler warnings to fix, he is happy with the quality of the code.
I'm pretty impressed by how warning-free the code builds on my system. There is a bunch of nice batches of code I'll have to look at reusing inside Kaffe eventually, though since Kaffe is written in C and HotSpot is written in C++ that's not necessarily going to be trivial.
When asked about the future of other open-source Java implementations, Topic does not see them stagnating. He expects the open-source community to contribute to OpenJDK, but that innovation will continue to happen in the other projects as OpenJDK will be maintained in a more conservative fashion. Topic suggests that the existing open projects may also migrate into unique niches, to help them continue to have value outside of OpenJDK.