"Project Peabody" adds two licenses that make it easier for outsiders to see the code. But Sun stops short of embracing open source.

With its ease of running code in many environments, the Java platform attracts a large share of open-source development interest.

Source code for Java already is available and has been for 10 years, he said. The current model for Java is close to an open source model, Gosling said.

Google's trying to make that job a little easier, introducing a new tool that automatically converts Java source code into Objective-C, which is used in iPad and iPhone apps.

Source code for the Java Development Kit (JDK) would be redone in UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format) to facilitate better-defined encoding, under a plan afoot in the OpenJDK Java community.