Impossible to marry enterprise and community needs in one
open source licence.
The licence under which Sun chooses to publish the open source Java code will cater to either enterprises or the open source community, but will be unable to please both groups.
"The biggest challenge is finding something that is going to balance commercial interests with the desires of the open source community," said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with RedMonk.
The open source community generally requests that the code is released under the General Public Licence (GPL), which requires that developers publish the source code of all the changes that they make.
Enterprises however are more fond of licences such as the BSD, Apache or CDDL, which allow them to mix the code with proprietary software without having to publish the code.
Those licences however are incompatible with the GPL, preventing the inclusion of Sun's open source Java in the Linux kernel.
"Ultimately somebody is going to be unhappy," O'Grady told vnunet.com.
"It's really a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't."
Sun could also adopt a dual licence, allowing users to choose between an open source and commercial licence.
While this would address some of the concerns, O'Grady argued that it wouldn't offer a perfect solution. The commercial licence still makes it hard for enterprises to build on top of Java because it requires them to work through Sun.
Sun Microsystems hasn't yet disclosed under which licence it will release the Java code. At the Linuxworld conference earlier this month the company said that it will release Java under one of the 58 OSI-approved open source licences and that the first code will arrive by October.
Rich Sands, Sun Microsystems' community marketing manager for the Java platform standard edition declined to comment on individual licenses.
"We will try to work to satisfy as many of the stakeholders in this as we can," Sands told vnunet.com.
"We know we that won't be able to satisfy everybody, but we are very actively soliciting input from both our commercial enterprise customers and clients as well as from the open source community."
The server maker has always stressed that it will try to prevent the fragmentation or forking of Java, where a group of developers could split off and draft an incompatible, independent version of the programming language.
The open nature of open source licences however by definition means that forks are possible, cautioned O'Grady.
"None of the licences will prevent [forking]. Once the code is open source, there is not a whole lot that you can do in terms of preventing forks," O'Grady said.
Raven Zachary, a senior analyst with the 451 Group who heads up the firm's open source group however argues that the GPL will best fit Sun's needs.
"The demand [for open source Java] is amongst the open source development community, not the enterprise. It's in Sun's best interest to concern themselves more about how an open source initiative for java impacts the developer community as opposed to an enterprise user base," Zachary told vnunet.com.
Sun is looking to reach new developers who might be able to add compelling, new functionalities to the Java technology, and those developers primarily programme for Linux, he argued. The programming language already has a strong following amongst enterprises.
"The greatest beneficiaries of open source Java are the developers."