A counterpoint: On the technical front, I see JavaSE/the JRE falling hopelessly behind C# and the CLR -- fear of Microsoft and distrust of Mono have kept the playing field a bit closer to being level, but I don't see Oracle as an organization that can really take advantage of that.
You are right, and the fear & distrust go both ways. The .NET "community" is almost entirely Microsoft fans and a good number of shills. The shills are rabidly anti-FOSS, the Microsoft employees are about evenly divided between FOSS-hostile and MS-provincial (with a tiny minority pro-FOSS), and the rest are just unaware of anything that Microsoft isn't hyping.
It's very hard to get momentum behind a free software project on .NET, and once you do Microsoft and their shill army kills it by reinvention, heavy promotion of their vaporware, and badmouthing the competition.
It's really hard to work against the culture, and the dominant .NET culture sees Redmond as the One True Source for anything worth using.
fear of Microsoft and distrust of Mono have kept the playing field a bit closer to being level, but I don't see Oracle as an organization that can really take advantage of that
Honestly, as someone who has no interest in Microsoft technologies and distrusts Mono, but who likes the idea of a batteries-included, CTO-friendly, cross-platform, JIT-compiling VM with a huge userbase and oodles of libraries, I am feeling a little lost now. Not that Java is going to die quickly -- I'm still learning Scala and expect that to be a good investment for a few years to come -- but it's starting to look like Java is a platform with a lot less future than I expected.
I'm still learning Scala and expect that to be a good investment for a few years to come
First let me disclaimer that this is totally my perspective on the subject but as a decision maker in a company that is now looking to move on and believes that this is the fatal shot to Java, I wanted to say that for us we feel that with the JVM shenanigans that any technology that runs on the JVM is in danger of Oracle's legal reach. After kicking this one around a lot among our peers we are hopeful that a language that run on the LLVM makes it to the forefront as a replacement.
