[atgreen]

I worked on gcj (and GNU Classpath) for a number of years. gcj's origins are in the embedded systems space, where our customers valued the small memory footprint and portability across processor architectures that were unlikely to get performant JITs. As we eased out of the embedded space, it was clear that jumping on the OpenJDK train was the right choice for Free Software-minded gcj/Classpath devs, as Sun adopted the GPL and GNU Classpath exception license. gcj was unlikely to ever catch up, and many of us were motivated by the idea of a Free Software Java solution, which Sun just handed to us.