NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Shares of Sun Microsystems added 2 cents to $5.29 in early action on Monday after the company said it's releasing its implementations of Java technology as free software.

With just over one month to Java 8's release, Java platform Chief Architect Mark Reinhold has proposed dropping Stripped Implementations in order to maintain backward compatibility.

In addition, Sun will make the binaries of Java-compatibility test kits available to nonprofit, academic open-source communities so they can create open-source implementations fully compatible ...