Sun's CEO Scott McNealy contends that Open Source is hurting Sun (and J2EE) in its fight against Microsoft (and 'NET).

In Sun's J2EE Standard Needs JBoss, Marc Fleury, JBoss founder, contends this.

O'Reilly's William Crawford has some interesting reflections on all this in J2EE Open Source.

VB and Java the only successful languages of the last two decades? Hmmm. Well, it really depends upon how you define successful. In terms of market share, I suppose that he's right, but people are successfully using Python, Ruby, Haskell, Objective C, PHP, Tcl and especially (shudder) Perl to develop useful tools, to name but a few. None of which detracts from his essential points.

It is certainly true that Java isn't really delivering revenue for Sun. But then, as Joel points out (Headline: Sun Develops Java; New "Bytecode" System Means Write Once, Run Anywhere), a hardware company developing a system which effectively makes hardware a commodity was always rather an odd decision. I'm not sure that you can pin the blame on Open Source!