Interesting article on the “opportunity costs” of Java not being open source:

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/wp-trackback.php?p=190

It fits in with my interest in the economics of programming languages, and adds a new twist to the debate over how to best popularize and profit from the creation and stewardship/ownership of a language.

I don’t agree with his point that Java would have been where “LAMP” is today – part of the attraction to PHP was how much it scales down, but most of his other points are dead on.