Java was the reason for Oracle to take over Sun (OK, also the hardware). Since Oracles commitment to open source is, "yeah, sure, Oracle will run on Linux. ONE version of ONE distro, but, yeah, Linux", this is more likely than ever to trigger a community-fork of Java, backed by IBM.

Oracle runs on both RHEL (and Oracle's crappy respin) and SLES. Albeit the installer is broken and packages are only provided for Express.

There is no way Java is going anywhere. We can actually hope that Oracle loses some interest in Java, thereby loosening their grip and letting the language evolve.

But I doubt it.

You think Java will be discontinued?

I doubt it because IBM has too much skin in the game. Few people are aware, but IBM produces its own JDK:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/

For that matter, the Apache Software Foundation has a Java implementation called 'Harmony', although I'm not sure they're allowed to call it Java.

That is a sadly long and storied history, which Stephen Colebourne describes best:

http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pi...

There is some hope that the legal shenanigans will stop once ORCL finishes taking ownership of JAVA.

BEA has its own JVM as well, and guess who bought BEA?

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jrockit/index.html

By the way, I think JRockIt is the best JVM out there for server-side deployments. I've used both JRockIt and Sun's JVM on EC2, and JRockIt has much better memory management.

I dunno. Hard to tell, but I hope not. The language might suck, but the JVM is rocking!