Green: Well, the Enterprise Edition is already open source. The GlassFish Project was released as open source last year. And so that was the first step in the open source availability of Java, and these are the next two steps.

IW: How are you addressing the potential for forking and what's really the difference between open source Java and the way it always was?

Green: Well, the truth of this is that Java, for the last year or two, has been developed in a completely open forum. You know, GlassFish, the latest release of SE, have all been available in source code form for developers to read and review and comment on for the last 18 months. And so from the aspect of transparency and open source, that's already been done. The issue here is really focused around changing the license, and in that regard, it's a significant change in the industry in terms of availability and flexibility. The real value to us is being able to make Java available to all of those organizations and all of those distributions who require an open source style license for inclusion in their [distributions], inclusion in their ISV products or their open source programs. And so this is really almost a licensing version of compatibility. By making this stuff available not only as transparent access to the code which we've already done, but changing it so that the legal description of access, there is likely to be a much greater uptake of Java in many of the open source programs in the industry.

IW: Now, would you say that Sun is doing the open-sourcing kind of kicking and screaming or is this is being done willfully?

Green: You know, I dragged on it for years. It was my fifth day back when we announced it. And so I think it was -- is on my list of really critically important items to get behind us. I think that the world has changed a lot. With regard to compatibility, compatibility can be seen as being managed in a number of ways. One, by offering tests and suites to ensure that the technology is in fact compatible. But the largest collection of compatibility tests in the Java world are all of the millions of applications on the desktop, on the handset, on the server, that have been produced out there. And so there is an increasing body of work that compels anybody dealing with Java to keep the technology compatible, because if it isn't, apps won't run and people will reject the variants that people create. So my assessment, and I think the assessment of many at Sun, is we're at the point now where there is such a mass of application investment that the risk of incompatibility is extremely low and thus it's time to do it.