Les Mikesell wrote: > already know how to use them. Imagine if every free OS distribution had > included a broken copy of bash and perl and maybe even C and internally > modified > their code so things still mostly worked. Were you around back in the late 90s when redhat shipped a broken gcc? :) Even today redhat seems to have the biggest mind share and perhaps even market share, so even if nobody else shipped the broken stuff that left a very large chunk of users impacted by it, and vendors as well since they built stuff to run on redhat. As for java I suppose having a working java binary in the base install certainly would help a bit, but for me the bulk of my work with java has been with Tomcat and BEA Weblogic. I'm not even sure today if tomcat is available in the base distros, and certainly Weblogic is not since it's a big fat expensive piece of shit, I mean piece of software. And even if tomcat was included it's not exactly the easiest thing to use out of the box, even after almost 7 years of using tomcat I still find regular old apache 10x easier to manage, so I lean towards more basic solutions when they present themselves. Java for other uses I believe has been hindered primarily due to performance reasons rather than lack of good binaries being included in the default distributions. It has a big stigma around it for good reason, JVM startup time isn't exactly fast, it tends to have a large memory footprint, and I think it wasn't until Java 1.5 that you had the ability to share a heap between multiple apps(not sure what the right terminology is), but being able to attach an app to an already running "common" VM. Maybe not but I think I read something about that a few years ago. Even though I do have the knowledge to be able to install the "right" JVM I tend to avoid java on my own systems wherever possible. It certainly has it's use cases, but I don't see it as something that should(or could) replace something like C or perl etc on a broad scale(at least not yet). The thing I dislike most about Java though isn't java itself, it's JMX. But that's another topic.. But I do agree that getting java in with a better license at a much earlier time would of helped, I'm just not sure how much. nate