Joshua Marinacci has posted that NetBeans will be under the GPL v2 with the classpath exception, as well as licensed under the CDDL if that license suits your organization better. A FAQ exists to explain what this means. Primarily, the change is to match the JDK (meaning that NetBeans will be GPLv3 if the JDK goes to that license?) and to make the platform more Linux-friendly. The classpath exception means that NetBeans' use of the GPL will not enforce the GPL on products that leverage NetBeans.

Great News for Linux community!

It would be nice if RedHat and others include NetBeans in their distro. With 6x release NetBeans can become most popular IDE providing good Profiler, acceptable UML tool, Vistual Editor for Swing and JSF (I wish they provide visual editor for GWT). SVN plugin is still ugly (I hope they will improve it as well). --Mark