Sun Microsystems maintains a policy of requiring testing for Java compatibility and already offers a great deal of Java technology in an open source fashion, Gosling said in an interview this week to discuss next week's JavaOne conference and other subjects. Gosling is CTO for the Java enterprise and developer group at Sun and is considered the father of Java.

"There's a bunch of people out there getting all hyper, and I don't believe there's anything there for them to get hyper about," Gosling said when asked about the possibility of a full open source route for Java.

Source code for Java already is available and has been for 10 years, he said. The current model for Java is close to an open source model, Gosling said.

Java developers, meanwhile, want to preserve interoperability and reliability, which is maintained by the current rules governing Java, Gosling said. To be certified as Java-compliant, software most undergo a test suite.

"They really like the fact that we're very compulsive about the whole testing thing," Gosling said.