The proof is in the pudding... Sun dances with this all the time, personally, I think its just a marketing ploy.
RedHat's development efforts with gcj and GNU classpaths is making very good progress. Now that JBoss is apart of RH, one can only see the open JVM will improve greatly.
Did JBoss get bought or are you just saying JBoss is bundled by RH?
The fact that I do not need to run a closed JVM to run OOo, eclipse, azureus etc on FC5 is very cool. The fact that I can build limewire, for example, with out Sun's JDK is even better!
Yes GCJ is getting very good. But it has a shitty JVM last time I checked. So unless you comple to x86 binary your code runs like crap. There is lots of Java bytecode out there and not all of it is open source or can be compiled with GCJ.
There is on going work on the mozplugin to make it work better with this enviroment and should be released in FC6 is really good.
So why worry about Sun's JVM?
Because it is better than GCJ and if it comes with a suitably unrestricted license (they say OSI certified) it will mean we get to the Java "finish line" faster on Linux. This won't kill GCJ either, it will only make GCJ better I think. Regards