The author pointed out that Sun/Oracle's posture is not resulting in as healthy an ecosystem as other languages with multiple independent free implementations.

"These multiple implementations of the languages are creating innovation on their respective platforms."

He also criticized the JVM.

"not resulting in as healthy an ecosystem"

No ecosystem? Clojure, Lucene/Solr, Cassandra, Groovy, Hadoop to name a few are all part of this excellent ecosystem.

Edit: There's some serious group think in HN. It seems any kind of alternate opinion gets immediately down modded. You may disagree with my opinion, but it is a valid and relevant opinion: Is all this lawsuit crap between the MegaCorps relevant to the average developer using Java for services?

I think he meant an ecosystem of differing implementation. When .NET actually looks more open than your platform, I think you need to rethink what you are doing. What people here are asking for is something similar to Mono, a complete reimplementation of the platform and language that is legally available.

And I agree that java has a large ecosystem built on top of it, making it even more important that the underlying stuff doesn't get controlled by one person.

Funny you mentioned 2 projects under the stewardship of the Apache Foundation, the same organization whom Sun proper fucked by first not releasing the TCK under reasonable terms, and second by releasing OpenJDK under a license incompatible with Harmony and too restrictive to be of any use to mobile phone manufacturers, but not restrictive enough to protect derivate works (GPLv3 was already released and the Apache license has a much stronger patents clause).

Here's some context: http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html

Also, all these language implementations are symptoms of a larger problem, can you guess which?

Yea I can guess, that Java the language sucks.

I'm just saying all these articles about the death or lameness of the JVM are not covering the big picture.

The JVM will be alive and well, but these developments and the fact that the JCP process is a joke are hurting the community a lot.

If the average developer would prefer to develop for Android rather than Java ME, I think it is indeed relevant.

To you it is very relevant. I'm just saying let's clarify who has a dog in this fight.

Believe it or not, I'm using Solr, Groovy and Clojure and in my eyes the (approved || sanctioned || blessed) JVM has never a better platform.

OK, you're a happy Clojure user (I'm not familiar with Groovy and haven't heard of Solr). Clojure is very functional and I expect idiomatic memory usage patterns are different than those of Java and other imperative OO languages.

Oracle's patent lawsuit against the Dalvik VM has cast a cloud on deep innovations in JVMs, such as GC implementations tuned for Clojure.

Is there going to be a long term problem? Who knows, who can say? All we know is that Oracle's lawyers were eager to sue Google whereas "patent suits [were] never in Sun's genetic code" (http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_hits...); what follows will depend on how that goes and who knows what else.

At the very least I'm pretty sure this is having a chilling effect. If you have various areas in which you can do things, why do deep JVM innovation. E.g. for Clojure, perhaps Clojure-in-Clojure targeting another platform, most especially x86_64? (This is not idle speculation, BTW.)

I don't disagree with anything you said.

I'm just saying the sky isn't falling for the average developer that is using the JVM. We'll all be using XYZ technology, which hasn't been invented yet, in 3-5 years anyway.

Google is the one with the short term vested interest in distributing a VM that runs Java.

Google's Dalvik (VM) does not run Java.

The Android _SDK_ is Java based. The Android apps are written in Java, the language, compiled into Java bytecode (Java class files) and the class files are converted into single dex file, which is custom instruction set. Then the app is moved onto the device and run.

The Android runtime is neither Java, nor JVM. It is custom (proprietary) VM that happens to use library that is API compatible with Java's standard library (Apache Harmony compiled and converted to dex; again, no java bytecode in sight).