Patents, for one. Field of use restrictions for another. OpenJDK's classpath exception to the GPL does not apply to JavaME related classes, thus limiting the use of OpenJDK for all platforms.

Well... It certainly doesn't look like J2ME has a bright future. Keeping it alive under present terms may be enough. The OpenJDK and Apache licenses protect against patent trolling by Oracle or IBM, so, that threat is not significant. The only problem would be the risk of deviating from current "safe" versions into Larry's patentland.

J2ME effectively died (became irrelevant) years ago. It still continues to ship in some low-end feature phones but no important developers are targeting new applications to that platform.

Java's standard library is one of its worst features. A fork could just throw this crap away and it wouldn't be too far off.

But honestly, people don't use Java because they want a good programming language. They use it because they're already using Java. That will be a problem for both Java 7 and any future fork.

Maybe people use Java because they want a solid cross-platform VM

Ditto. Though I'd narrow "cross platform" to non-Microsoft. No hate for MS, but I don't see deploying Windows servers and associated licensing costs any more likely for me than buying Oracle licenses.

So yeah, as a small Ruby shop that was looking at JRuby as a stepping stone to a robust VM, this concerns me.

Longtime Java dev here, I'd say taking Java, and the JVM, and creating a NEW set of libraries would be awesome.

As you said the Java libraries are total crap. Sun was for a while hell-bent on throwing out everything that's good while putting in a lot of badly designed ugly classes. And some things, like AWT and Swing, were just crap from the very start.

A fresh start would be awesome. The main thing that's currently good about Java is the JVM, and Eclipse. Ruby is infinitely more elegant but the dynamic typing and lack of IDE support kills it for me.

A lot of the ruby elegance comes from the dynamic typing.