InfoWorld: What would be gained and what would be risked if Java was open sourced?

Johnson: I think the gain would be that perhaps. It would be possible for a number of fixes to go into the language. For example, there are a number of situations where there is an awareness that there are certain bugs in the platform. Mainly relatively minor, of course; I mean overall it's extremely stable. But nevertheless, I think you would very quickly see a large number of fixes, at probably a more rapid rate. So, for example, there's the Java Bug Parade; there's a number of issues that haven't been fixed for a number of years. I think they'd probably be fixed fairly quickly. You would probably also see maybe the emergence of other large companies besides Sun taking a very strong interest, and I think that would be a positive rather than a negative. In terms of what are the potential negatives, I think that if it were done carefully, there probably wouldn't be many potential negatives. I think it's vital that if there were an open source Java [and] the project was very tightly controlled, probably by some kind of non-profit or something, I think that it would definitely involve a degree of control in direction rather than say going to a model where you have a very large group of contributors checking in code all the time, which makes it hard to guarantee the stability of the platform.

InfoWorld: By having some sort of control, you would prevent forking, correct?

Johnson: I would have thought that forking would have been unlikely ... Forking is a pretty radical thing, and I would [think] that frankly if the project were healthy around an open source Java, a fork would just not be successful, so therefore the threat of a fork would not really be terribly significant.

InfoWorld: Do you think AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is being over-hyped?