It appears that Sun are planning to withdraw from the PAS process thay began two years ago. They lamely try to blame Microsoft for 'buying off' the ISO. I think it was very clear from the start that the whole ISO thing was a pile of marketing bs to head off developer concerns about the proprietary nature of Java. I don't believe that any progress was ever made on Java standardisation and the whole business became effectively just a rubber stamp for Sun. The official ISO group (SC22JSG) was never consulted at any stage. The time is now past for action to be taken. Either Sun must open up Java's source and specifications under a GPL compatible licence or the Java community must take it upon themselves to produce an open source Java clone, following the published APIs but free to evolve in it's own way in the future. The JavaLobby are running a discussion on this topic.