Java finally open-sourced. Does anyone still care?

I agree. It's irritating how idiotic people get with languages. They go from "This is the bees knees! It can be used anywhere! It's the best thing since sliced bread", to "This is irrelevant now we have our new fad favourite language"

Why can't a language just be good at some things, and not others? Do we need a grand unifying language that is great for everything?

If you want a reliable, scalable, bullet proof backend, java is still pretty hard to beat.

Java 7 should add closures. And in the mean time, most of the times you would be using closures, you can use anonymous inner classes.

In the Sun release in May of last year, it was something like 4-5% of the code and most of it had to do with graphics stuff: font & image rasterizing, etc. which makes sense. I think that's why most of the developers didn't care much one way or the other.

Not sure I follow you. Most desktops are some flavor of Windows, call it +90%. What piece of technology, not present previously, became ubiquitous on Windows once it was open sourced? Open sourcing java doesn't mean much for end users on the desktop, imo.

The commercial open sourcing of java will matter on the ecosystem and it's a good thing for java developers (which, despite HN demographics, there are still millions of). Particularly, when you consider the flaws of the JCP and Sun's control to this point.

Good going Sun indeed--stick to making awesome hardware.