I agree with you that Sun will forever be held back by their past actions. Must the same way KDE is still not quite as accepted because of the Qt licensing scuf

I agree with you that Sun will forever be held back by their past actions. Must the same way KDE is still not quite as accepted because of the Qt licensing scuffle - what 10 years ago? However when you look at the success of big complex projects - Eclipse coming to mind first - on Java, there is no equivalent on .NET that really works on every platform. I too think there will be another language that succeeds C++ in FOSS, and I thought it would be Python, but not so sure now. C will always live on in a lot of the more important stuff like the kernel and basic utilities, but desktop apps will eventually move on. That is a discussion for something else, but I don't believe it will be Java or Mono. I'm just saying that Java is a better system if your primary goal is cross platform. If your primary goal is to build great Linux apps - then it is not.