For the people who are currently interested in java as it relates to centos now that Sun has GPL'd java there are some things to be aware of.
The folks at jpackage.org are pretty much all over this development but it's not the bright shiny news everyone has made it out to be. Sun did a very good thing by moving java under the GPL, and they should be commended for FINALLY seeing the light after the failure of the DLJ license BUT:
1. Sun did not open all of java under the GPL. There are still several chunks of java which remain license encumbered and will require community workarounds or further moves by Sun to open code. Currently these include the color management code, font rasteriser code, graphics rasteriser code, and several more.
2. Sun is not opening up the Java trademark, so any GPL'd distribution of java will not be called 'java', but something else. I've heard that iceweasel is taken, so I don't know what the next best option is.
The fine folks at jpackage are working the details further. This basically means that for the time being, there will not be a gpl'd jdk in centos4, and packages will have to be distributed under the DLJ license (which I am not a fan of) or obtained from java.sun.com and used in conjunction with the jpackage sun-java-compat packages for best performance.