Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Azureus, JXplorer, SquirrelSQL. OK, the last few there aren't "Top Tier" applications by any stretch, but they are certainly widely used.

Oh come on, you can probably name a hundred Cocoa apps or Flash-based web pages for each client-side Java app you can think of. Perspective!!

Anyway, name for me a big Python or Ruby client side app.

Can't. But then again, Ruby hasn't had a cross-platform windowing toolkit attached to it for 11 years. We'll see if connecting Ruby to Python to Cocoa goes any better than Cocoa-Java did. I suspect not, but then again, there was an audience for "rich GUI toolkit + simple programming language" back in the Visual Basic day, and I'm not sure where they went. Maybe they're doing DHTML or Flash? Or maybe they're waiting for Ruby/Python-Cocoa.

As a bit of an aside, but also remember that the Flex server and Flex Builder environment, as well as ColdFusion are Java-based. Dragging on Java is eventually going start putting a kink in Adobe's product offering.

OK, dude, you're server-side and I haven't been for a while, so you tell me: do you unit test on your own machine (with maybe a test db or mocks for your persistence), or do you unit test on an actual server? I'm just wondering how much it matters that your desktop OS be able to run the Flex Server or ColdFusion, if in practice it's possible (or maybe even desirable) to just NFS mount (or whatever) your dist directory over to a server and unit test over there.

How about in stead of making more money, Apple goes for "costs less." If Apple would just merge their fork into the OpenJDK project, I suspect there would be plenty of people who would work to make sure Apple sees first-class support.

There's already talk about running OpenJDK on OS X / Darwin, assuming it'll have to be X11. I guess the advantage of an Apple contribution would be that you'd pick up a Cocoa AWT implementation... and hope the community could keep it up to date.