“A day after Sun Microsystems withdrew Java 2 from
consideration as an industry standard, free software advocates
vowed Wednesday to build open source substitutes for the Java
programming language.“
“Already, parts of the necessary programming language code are
publicly available, and more will be developed, open source
community leaders said. But Sun executives adamantly denied that
enough of the Java spec is available to make an alternative.”
“We will work on alternatives,” said Richard Stallman of
Cambridge, Mass., a MacArthur Foundation fellow and outspoken
founder of the GNU project. “There are people writing a set of
libraries and there are others developing a byte code interpreter
and compiler.”