ESR is crazy (Score 4, Interesting)

What a bizarre letter. ESR must have some heavy-duty Open Source fanboy goggles to see things that way.

I can't imagine what he was thinking when he said that Java is losing out to Perl and Python among Open-sourcers. Java does not compete with P&P on any front whatsoever. Java has proven to be an awkward, heaviweight technology on the client side, and makes a very poor scripting language. But it shines on the server end, where its strong, secure type-checking and exception handling makes programs reliable, and where long-running repetitive tasks allow JIT technology all the time it requires to do an excellent optimization job.

IBM is totally behind Java. It's not going anywhere, libre or not, and Sun is in a good position setting the standards. If I take off my own Free Software fanboy goggles for a minute, it's pretty clear there's no motivation for Sun to make Java free.