James Gosling: on the Java road...

James Gosling: on the Java road... "There's been a lot of churn lately over open letters from IBM and others calling for Sun to open source Java. Rather than try to respond to everyone individually, I'll try to respond to a pile of questions here:
Some have asked why IBM is sending open letters, rather than talking to us directly: asking if this isn't rather kindergarten-ish. Well, yes: it does appear that way.
Some have asked what IBM would get if Java were open-sourced: doesn't IBM already have the source? Again yes, they do have the source. It's also true that anyone can get the source. The major restriction is that if folks want to redistrubute their changes, they have to pass the test suite. Which means that about the only thing that they could get from liberalization is to be able to skip testing."

(See the post for several other response points.)