You have to hand it to Jonathan Schwartz. He has a way with words.

Who else would have described IBM's call-to-arms to Sun, expressed in an open letter released last week and reported here, as "bonky"?

It can only be assumed that this is a variant of "bonkers" as in around the bend, balmy, barmy, bats, batty, buggy, cracked, crackers, daft, dotty, fruity, haywire, insane, kookie, kooky, loco, loony, loopy, nuts, nutty, round the bend, wacky, whacky.

Commenting on the open letter in the middle of a Sun "Chalk Talk" session with the media in San Francisco, Schwartz compared and contrasted Sun's vision for Java with the Linux community's vision for Linux.

The essential difference, as he sees it, is that the Linux community positively celebrates choice and encourages forking, with dozens and dozens of different flavors and distros, while "In the Java world, we had the opposite motivation, which was to ensure that compatibility ruled the day."

So IBM's Rod Smith may have to wait, by the sound of it, for word from Sun that it is ready to collaborate "an independent project to open-source Java" - which was what Smith's open letter to Sun's chief engineer Rob Gingell suggested.

CBR Magazine's Gavin Clarke interpreted what Schwartz said more encouragingly:

"Sun Microsystems Inc is open to relinquishing stewardship of Java to a neutral third party, but is apparently against releasing the language to open source under GPL." writes Clarke.

"The company's software chief said an organization such as certification and program management specialist KeyLabs could be suited to managing Java," he continued.

According to Clarke, Schwartz said Sun is "open" to giving up control to an organization like KeyLabs.