IcedTea
Apparently, Java™ is now Free. Or will be by 1Q07.
This means that the Sun JDK can now move out of the multiverse ghetto in Ubuntu. And will ship with Feisty Fawn. Meanwhile, Debian will find some excuse to rebrand it IcedTea or some other childish nonsense.
Apache Harmony (which contrary to published reports exited incubation last month [our bad, as we haven’t updated the website yet - Ed.]) will continue to thrive, and will attract the attention of those contributors who are not interested in assigning joint ownership of their copyrights over to Sun. Had Sun instead chosen some public organization like the FSF, I’d be even more impressed, but ultimately, it is their IP to do with as they please. They have a every right to create a heliocentric organization around their codebase. I’d also have been more impressed if the Classpath Exception also applied to J2ME.
Parts of Classpath will merge; the rest will atrophy, as the epic battle has been won.
This will further damage Mono, which will increasingly be portrayed as only being viable if you are willing to make a long term commitment to a commercial vendor that in turn is able to work out an agreement with Microsoft. Update: Go Miguel and Nat!
Those that yearn for more agile languages will continue to do so. Some may even run these languages on the JVM, that is, if they can abide by the startup costs.
But mostly when everything settles down, the world won’t look all that much different. Except that some of those that who didn’t even realize that they had a hankering for Iced Tea will have found another perfect Pepsi.