The iron grip that Sun Microsystems Inc. has maintained on Java
will loosen significantly this week, drastically altering the face
of Java development.
“Java is bigger than Sun, bigger than IBM, bigger than any one
vendor,” said David Gee, program director of Java marketing at
IBM’s Internet Division, in Cupertino, Calif. “We are big believers
in the open-source process.” IBM will announce this week plans to
move its Jikes Java byte code generator to an open-source
model.