Sun, however, may face an obstacle: its own culture, Topic said.

"I think an interesting challenge is going to be to make sure that the culture within Sun that exists around the code base works well to this whole process of opening up," Topic said. Governance of Java, as far as dealing with contributions, also will need to be worked out, he said.

A developer in Sao Paolo, Brazil who is a former Sun employee called the open source move a great step and one that was a long time coming.

"I'm one of the people who have been asking for an open source Java implementation for quite some time," said developer , who heads up the SouJava Java user group in Sao Paolo.

Open source, Souza said, "is the best way to develop software and is the best way for people to use software."