[acqq]

Isn't the "bastardized version" of Java actually the "Java as supported by Red Hat"? If you don't want RH's support but still want some support of course you have to depend on some other company.

And the reason why you consider RH's version "bastardized" is, I assume, that it's not "the newest and latest." Which is the main argument with which we started: that RH intentionally doesn't push "newest" all the time in order to have long support cycles.

Your argument for Microsoft was that their technology changes slower, and then complain that RH technology doesn't change fast enough?

[csmithuk]

Not really. They barely support it, it's half integrated into RPM and is impossibly difficult to persuade a lot of stuff to work with it due to system dependencies on certain jars. You end up having to pull a full JDK from somewhere else which isn't supported.

If you look at the CLR there are only two major current versions: 2.0 and 4.0 and perfect legacy compat and wide support across all windows server versions.