The move won't be easy, said a former Sun employee. The company has a rigid old guard of middle managers who have opposed open sourcing Java, said Denese Cooper, who worked on open-source projects at Sun for six years and is on the board of the Open Source Initiative.

"What they have to do in order to make it work is either retarget or somehow indoctrinate these people who have been guarding the gates against viable open sourcing of Java for all these years," Cooper said. "It's going to be interesting to see what other moves they will have to make to make that happen."

"Basically, we've already come 90 percent of the way towards having several full, compatible, free software Java 1.5 implementations, without Sun's support," Topic said. "I don't think that Sun would like to promote the message that open source Java has, for the most part, already been done, without them contributing."