Portals and Open Source

Sun have announced that their Sun Java System Portal Server (jsr168) system, is to be released as open source. They've already released some of the more minor components, a few portlets.

I'd like to put this down to high ideals on the part of Sun, but I find it hard. They've seen that the portal market is being consolidated by merges, both planned and in progress and they don't want to be left out in the cold. By open sourcing their portal server they place themselves to merge with the other contenders and greatly reduce the cost of supporting and maintaining the software going forward.