It's not the J in Java Virtual Machine that matters, it's the VM

During the June 18 Gillmor Gang show, I asked Hummer Winblad's Mitchell Kertzman about open source business models. Kertzman said ¹ that the key factor, from his perspective, is the way in which the open source stack frees commercial software companies from the burden of "dragging around an expensive platform." He also questioned the need ² for the JVM, citing two reasons. First, that Java's portability has become a non-issue now that there are only two platforms that matter: .NET and Linux. Second, that the rise of XML Web services has given a boost to the text-savvy scripting languages: Perl/Python/PHP, the "P" in LAMP.
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