"It's pretty wide open at the moment," Cote said. "There's already several people who have been writing GPL versions for the VM (virtual machine)," he said, adding that new virtual machines might offer better performance and be easier to set up.

A wider audience is now able to use and learn about Java, he said. "There's a lot of open source developers who aren't interested in developing in commercial platforms," Cote said. The GPL brings a lot of open source advocates in the mix, he said.

As far as potential incompatibility issues that arising from the open sourcing, developers will be motivated to ensure compatibility, Cote said. Compatibility is a main advantage of the platform, Cote emphasized.

"You don't have to have a bunch of if-then-else statements when you write to Java. You just write to Java," Cote said.

Still, the possibility of forking exists. But incompatible implementations could not use the Java brand, Cote said.