Overall, he said, many users will welcome the announcement -- even with few details available -- because of the growing popularity of open source software within the enterprise.

"When open source first came out, it was largely the technologist that was implementing it, but the enterprise was shying away,"Kaplan said. "But just the announcement that Java to some degree -- possibly all of it -- will be coming to open source shows how open source is really getting adopted in the enterprise. The advantages are the cost savings to the users [and] the ability for people to develop third-party solutions on top of the stack."

One of the reasons Sun has given repeatedly over the years for not releasing Java to the open-source community is fear that the language would get "fractured,"resulting in incompatible implementations by different vendors.

Dimitrios Gianninas, rich Internet application developer at Optimal Payments Inc., said it is too early to tell if Sun's announcement will lead to incompatible implementations of Java. His company, a Montreal-based electronic payments processor, over the past year has replaced several commercial Java tools with open source tools. The company rarely modifies the open source tools it uses, he said.

"I'm pretty sure there would be a base version of Java that would be distributed by Sun, and that's what everyone would use,"he said. "There might be some compatibility issues regarding application servers that are running and testing on version 'X,' but version 'Y' of Java is out now."