Why Sun Open Sourcing Java Is Good
Sun did a great move with this. Their idea is most likely to slow C# adoption and perhaps even turn it around but there is more. Lots of projects will see the light of day and others which have been started already will make some big noise in the industry.
I can think of JRuby which allows a user to compile ruby to java bytecode and use java libraries directly in their code. This allows programmers the best of both worlds. They can write using a concise high level language and excute it on a very fast and portable platform.
But it doesn’t stop here. Parrot is a project aiming to unify numerous languages under one portable platform. Essentially this platform could run compiled languages from very high languages such as LISP or Java without any problem. Parrot could borrow much of the infrastructure Java uses to make it even better.
I do expect some big news to come out of this within the next 6 month.