"It actually puts control of the software into the hands of the user," Souza said. If a vendor stops developing a piece of software, for instance, the community at large can take on that task in the open source paradigm, he said.

The open source move means Java developers and others can partner with each other and distribute the results instead of just collaborating with Sun, Souza said.

Souza listed a slew of potential projects that can be undertaken in the open source world. These could include an improved font rendering system and enhancements to the Swing UI, Souza said. Java also may be extended to new platforms and even to video games, he added. Application time issues can be resolved in the Java virtual machine and Java tools and documentation can be translated to new languages.

An open source community integrated with other efforts must rise up for Java to reach its potential, Souza emphasized. "People think once it's open sourced, then magically it gets better. That's not really true," he said.

Although the community has been able to look at Java source code, now they can do more innovations and modify the code, said analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk.