I’m very happy that classpath exists, even though I’ll probably never use it for work. But I might end up using an embedded VM if they write one (and it’s fast enough) so I can ship Alien Flux free of license wrinkles.
Cas 
Classpath doesn’t write VMs. They write the libraries for most (all?) of the free VMs out there. If(!) gcj works for Alien Flux, you could compile it to native code and ship it without license problems.
I already have Jet for that, and as it’s cheap for what it does, it’s not worth trying gcj for just the same problems + more weirdass opensourceness.
Cas
But Jet doesn’t seem to solve your license problems and I thought this is what you are talking about.
Jet solves my license problems just fine. Actually the real problem I have is size, and fixing the size problem results in the license problem.
Cas
Does Jet allow you to legally distribute Alien Flux as EXE without shipping the JRE along with it?
Yes. There is no JRE included in the Jet compiled version of Alien Flux, it’s a single, standalone executable file.
Cas
If this is legal, what is your license problem?
I don’t really want to have to use Jet, it’s very awkward and just another thing to add to the long list of headaches induced when doing a release. (Well, it was awkward when I bought it, but it has probably improved).
Cas
Languages tend to stick around. Look at fortran, IMHO one of the main reasons it’s still around is because the huge amount of scientific libraries. Now take a look at java, it’s grown so much in the past years, thousands of classes, and and a lot of packages. It seems that a lot of people are moving to .NET for its huge libraries, and it costs a lot to get into, and it’s the same with fortran, java is completely free, if you want a cool IDE like .net has, than IBM has created one for free. I’m not trying to start a flame about ‘java VS .NET’, theres already a thread about that. What I’m saying is that java is something that’s easy to get into, along with a huge amount of classes, it will be a while before some company invests as much money and time into a language as sun and IBM has. If some how a company does manage to spend the time and money, it will look like choped liver for a while before it starts looking like java…
As for open sourceing of java, it might help in certain ways, some of which are languages like groovy and jython which run on java, designers of those languages might like to ship their less buggy version of java with their SDK? Are there any problems with doing this?