The licence under which Sun Microsystems chooses to publish the open source Java code will cater to 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 code of all the changes they make.

Enterprises, however, are more fond of licences such as the BSD, Apache or Common Development and Distribution Licence, which allow them to mix the code with proprietary software without having to publish the changes.

But these licences 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 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 would not 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 has not yet disclosed under which licence it will release the Java code. The company said at the LinuxWorld conference earlier this month that it will release Java under one of the 58 licences approved by the Open Source Initiative and that the first code will arrive by October.