One doesn't need to be an automobile engineer to drive a car. Similarly, one shouldn't have to be a software engineer to use a computer. On that simple premise, James Gosling, spurred by his boss Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, set about more than 13 years ago to create a computer software that would work across different kinds of machines-PCs, TVs, or mobile phones. The result was Java, which Gosling's employer launched in 1995. (Java's ability to run on different devices is due to a Java virtual machine, which "translates" the programme into a language that the device understands). The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

Think internet and the programming language that springs to mind is Java as much as HTML. Gosling, who shared his grad school digs with Pradeep Sindhu of Juniper Networks and Satish Gupta, a top researcher at IBM, is currently the Chief Technology Officer of Sun's Developer Products Group, and Fellow of Sun Labs. In fact, more than ever, Sun's future, darkened by open source Linux and cheap Intel servers, may depend on people like Gosling, who are entrusted with the task of producing the next big winner for Sun. On the day BT met Gosling (May 19), he had turned 49 but was too jet-lagged to celebrate. But the next day in Hyderabad, some 3,000 Java developers cut a cake for him and even sang "happy birthday" to him. ("Quite overwhelming" is how Gosling describes the experience on his web page.) On his second visit to India (the first was to attend Gupta's wedding 19 years ago), the Canadian-born Gosling spoke to BT's Venkatesha Babu on the future of Java. Excerpts:

After fighting Microsoft for years, you recently signed an agreement with them. Critics are saying that you have supped with the devil.

(Smiles) A lot of it reads like bad conspiracy-theory stuff. People have been reading between the lines and making stuff up. We have not sold our soul to the dark side. We haven't overnight turned into mindless lap dogs. A lot of people seem to want us to just keep suing (Microsoft) further. We won. Period. Sun has to move on. The world has to move on.

So Sun has not sold its soul to Microsoft for $1.9 billion...

No, that is the price for winning. Let us be clear here. Sun won.

"We have not sold our soul to the dark side (Microsoft). We won. Period. Sun has to move on. The world has to move on"

Sun's signing into Microsoft (MS) communications protocols locks Sun and its customers into interoperation with any Microsoft system at their strict terms, conditions and royalty rates. It also denies the possibility that the code using those MS protocols will ever be open sourced at all...

No. Not at all. While it is true that as a part of the agreement, we did sign up for Microsoft's communications protocol program, our full agreement both modifies and expands on it to give us a much broader and more useful agreement. It is important to understand that in no way does this lock Sun or Sun customers into interoperating with any Microsoft system on Microsoft's strict terms. Right now, the vast majority of the software that Sun produces has free and open specifications and we are not going to slow down our involvement in the open source community. All the agreement ensures is that we simply have the ms option, if we decide that the benefits outweigh the costs.

I know you hate the Java-guy tag, but are you still associated with it on a day-to-day basis?

I haven't actually written code that got checked into the Java mainline for close to two years now. But I am certainly involved in lots of engineering discussion and development tools lately. The thrust has been on setting the direction. Of course, with help from a lot of other people involved in the Java community.

Is Java getting too complicated for its own good? There is criticism that Java is getting difficult to code in, that it is too slow, too much of a memory hog and it is bloated.

Well, if you take a look at all the specifications and all the different pieces of Java standards it is gigantic. But almost nobody needs the whole of that. The thing that makes Java so workable is that everything is modular. There are really hundreds of independent packages but most applications use only few of that. You can pick and choose.

What about criticism that Java is not all that open because of the amount of control Sun has over it?

Not true at all. Developers value Java's cross-platform interoperability and reliability. They're afraid that if Java is open-sourced then someone will try to fragment the community by creating incompatible versions and ignore the community process, just like Microsoft did. This is a big issue for us.

IBM has repeatedly called for Java to become completely open source.

Well, well (smiles), what can one expect from them? IBM is just looking for a chain to yank. Remember they are also one of our biggest competitors. So anything that they can do to snag things away from us, they will do. If you look at the way Java is distributed right now, for people who are writing applications on it, there are no restrictions whatsoever on redistributing the Java bean binary. We make all of that freely available. No charge. You can deploy it wherever you wish. The only difference between our license and full open source is the requirement for testing. This is to ensure that proprietary versions of Java that don't work with each other do not spring up.

"Richard Stallman is a religious zealot. He fundamentally believes that intellectual property is evil"

It is not just IBM, even open source guru Richard Stallman has written about "the Java trap".

The open source community is very mixed. Richard Stallman is a religious zealot...I mean Stallman fundamentally believes intellectual property is evil. If you read his manifesto on things like General Public License, he believes that interoperability is a bad idea and that no one should be allowed to earn money from software. Forever. GPL limits any ability for testing. You can distribute anything and call it, for instance, Linux. No requirement at all that it work. Whereas Sun thinks the software should work. If we follow their prescription, it is a nightmare of incompatibility.

Besides making an obscure coffee bean (Java) a part of the lingo of every techie, has Java financially delivered for Sun?

Hugely. It's mostly been indirect leverage. We have made a fair amount of money by offering Java. We earn licence fees for Java software deployed in things like cell phones and smart cards. We earn more by making the Java Virtual Machine technology open than we would have earned by charging a licence fee. We still invest substantially, because Java is an enabling technology for an awful lot of our high-end stuff. The single most reason is that it makes available a large pool of software that runs on our hardware.

What is the roadmap ahead for Java?

That is the beauty of the thing. There is no roadmap. It will go wherever the developer community takes it to. Sun puts a lot of emphasis on things like enterprise, desktop software and cell phone software and for us...we will keep using Java.

India has one of the largest developer communities in the world. Are you here to convert or preach to the converted?

In most senses, it is preaching to the converted. I see the Indian developer community is extremely dynamic and I want to get a first hand feel of what is happening here. Several of them are doing very interesting stuff. Sun itself has around 700 people here and there are blue circles all over the map. India is also becoming an important hardware market for us. India has the largest development centre of Sun outside Silicon Valley.

If Intel's entry-level chips with, say Linux, can do what Sun's top-end machines could do earlier, you are getting squeezed in the middle. What is the future?

Well, it is certainly a time that has all kinds of challenges. But the interesting thing is that because of all the Java thing... if you look at the developer community, a lot of them are doing things that run on Sun's systems. Sun has faced (tough) times in the past and come out a winner. We are in a great position to be adaptable. Sun will win again.

Does that mean Sun will be squeezed out of hardware and forced to become a software maker?

I don't think it will happen. Yes, we might see more revenues coming from the software end but we will still be competitive and profitable.