Green spoke with Computerworld Wednesday. Excerpts from that interview follow:

Are there any caveats or 'ifs' to your plan to open-source Java? I think the only caveats would be that if our findings, based on the feedback from the community, were overwhelmingly against it, we would certainly reconsider. And it's plausible, it is imaginable -- although unlikely -- that people would be concerned about risks of incompatibility as a byproduct of this. That evokes significant fear and risk in people, and that's the only thing I can foresee as a gating issue.

What will be the process for getting this community feedback, and at what point will you know whether you have that buy-in? I can't give a date when we will know. But I think we established during the [conference] some of the means that we will be using, which is membership feedback, participation in a JCP [Java Community Process] and other things, the number of downloads of both the Net Beans tools as well as the Java implementations. The more activity and the more involvement that there is, the greater the likelihood that people will be understanding and compelled to rely on the branded and compatible versions of the open-source software to go do it.

So if you get negative feedback and people saying, "We have grave concerns about Java forking," you may drop the whole idea of open-sourcing Java? I don't think 'drop the whole idea' is a likely possibility. I think we have to go sit down with representatives from the community and JCP and really understand the reasons for concern and see if we can put programs in place to overcome them. Our strong perspective is to proceed here, and if there is a matching strong reason in the community not to do so, our preference would be to try to work it out rather than just stop.

In the past Sun has been pretty clear about its fears that open-source might lead to a forking. What is prompting this shift on the part of Sun? There [are] two big trends. In general, the open-source initiatives around the world -- a really good example that we're keying on is the Open Solaris initiative -- are demonstrating that additional contribution, additional use, produces better innovation, more rapid innovation, and doesn't seem to compel people to want to diverge. We certainly haven't seen that very frequently. There's another issue: Over time, the continuous growth of the portfolio of applications that have been written to a compatible platform exert pressure to remain compatible. If there are these applications out there that will run only on a compatible version, and if you were to come out and diverge with an incompatible version, you won't be able to run those apps. Who would do that? Why would you want to build an implementation of any software platform that could not run the application base out there. It's the mass. As the number of lines of code that use compatible Java continue to go up, there is increased force to ensure that implementations of the platform are compatible. Developers don't like to build apps that don't run.