Ted Neward thinks that .NET is viable on other platforms.

Is it just me, though, or are his points one and two somewhat contradictory? He says that WinForms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, etc. won't be available off Windows. If you start leaving this sort of stuff out, how valuable is .NET anyway?

J2EE is indeed separate from, J2SE, but it's every bit as cross-platform, and every bit as free (i.e. free as in beer, but not free as in speech).