Gosling on Open Sourcing Java

"The source code is being open sourced, but the process of defining the spec is still the Java Community Process. In addition, there are massive test suites, and we will do an immense amount of testing. We expect that people who care about reliability and compatibility with the spec will use our version.

The source code is being open sourced, but the process of defining the spec is still the Java Community Process.

You know, most people in the open-source world who use open-source software don't actually do builds themselves -- those people just download the binaries. And so we expect that the big enterprise people will just do that, and we will certainly be providing binaries that have been through full industrial-strength QA, that have been through all the conformance testing.

So it shouldn't give anybody any concerns as far as fragmentation. We're not just going to let random people check random code in. Just like every other open-source project, we will end up with a set of rules for who's allowed to check in a lot. Everything will get checked and rechecked and debugged."
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/gosling_os1_qa.html