> there was no driving need to interoperate with a proprietary one That's highly debatable - both the need for interoperability and the proprietary parts. Maki

> there was no driving need to interoperate with a proprietary one That's highly debatable - both the need for interoperability and the proprietary parts. Making the platform attractive to developers is a driving need making it interoperable is a byproduct of that. And Java was open sourced in 2007.