James gosling has put down his comments on the recent puch by IBM to open source java... must read

Excerpts of the article:

There's been a lot of churn lately over open letters from IBM and others calling for Sun to open source Java. Rather than try to respond to everyone individually, I'll try to respond to a pile of questions here:

Some have asked what IBM would get if Java were open-sourced: doesn't IBM already have the source? Again yes, they do have the source. It's also true that anyone can get the source. The major restriction is that if folks want to redistrubute their changes, they have to pass the test suite. Which means that about the only thing that they could get from liberalization is to be able to skip testing.

Some have asked when, given IBM's apparent zeal for open source, DB2 and WebSpere will be open sourced: ask them, not me - it does seem unlikely

Most of the comments I've heard from folks about open sourciing Java have been negative. Hmmm... Not so much negative as concerned: Developers value Java's cross platform interoperability and reliability. They're afraid that if Java is open-sourced then someone will try to fragment the community by creating incompatible versions of Java and ignore the community process, just like Microsoft did. Microsoft did a lot of damage to the community and many developers strongly do not want that to happen again