I don't really see this as having much effect on Java at all. I see a lot of nerd rage at Oracle for how they've managed Java so far (including from me - I think Elison is a douche) but face it - nerds ain't the target market for Java. Nerds have hated Java from the outset - it's not cool enough, it doesn't have whizzy features from functional programming, it's too slow, it's too corporate, it's too hyped.

Well, now over a decade later and a tonne of real work has been done by real companies with Java. By people who don't give a shit about whether it's buzzword compliant or 'free as in speech'.

Nerds getting their knickers in a twist about freedom or whether you can write 'hello world' in 20 less characters, or whether you can implement currying in Java are just not the target market for Java and quite frankly, outside a very small cloistered world, they're not really an important market, either.

One day, Java will be superceeded, and I expect that it will be something akin to Gosu - kinda like Java, Java compatable but 'better' enough in some way to make people want to move - much like the C to C++ transition happened: people can keep their existing investments and codebases, but start doing new stuff in a way which adds some value. I don't think such a language exists yet - Gosu doesn't offer enough I think. But one day,