Is that Sun's worst nightmare waiting to be cooked up? If it is then it's all to do with marketing, not technology.

Sun's fear is that Java will be forked and be associated with a non-Sun organization or corporation. Just look at how Ubuntu shot through the post-dotcom Linux distribution quagmire to sit alongside Red Hat and Suse as a tier-1 operating system brand. Linux distributions have essentially the same open source software, they're just packaged and branded differently. So will Sun, in an attempt to keep the Java brand tied to its own, introduce some "no forking" clause in Java's open source licence, or perhaps a "fork if you will but you can't call it Java" directive.

Indeed, the menu is changing with the new JDK Distros recipe which aims to communicate best practices for packaging Java with Linux distributions. Whatever the licence, Sun's fears of runaway 'Java' clones flooding the Internet - and confusing end users - are quite inconsistent with other, comparable open source projects. Sure, there's forking of individual applications and whole operating systems, but in the development space there are countless examples - like Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby to name a few - that have continuously thrived as a single source of the truth despite being fully open to the possibility of forking. It's time for Sun to stop treating Java like its own little cupcake, because giving up control will make better consuming for all.