I can’t resist reacting to this type of comment. I happened to have used Visual Studio and other IDE’s for Java such as Eclipse, and speaking from my own experience, Visual Studio is far from being a productive environment compared to the Java ones, and you have to pay a pretty price for it too while the Java tools are free. To get Visual Studio to a comparable level of richness, one would need to buy third party plug-ins such as ReSharper to make up for VS’s shortcomings.

Take this from a developer who has actually done significant work in both .NET and Java: It would have taken me longer to write LMMS in the .NET environment and the resulting code base would have been larger and less flexible. This is not about the language at all. Both Java and C# are very productive languages to develop in. The difference is due to the development environments and the frameworks.

I’m presuming the TCO is mostly influenced by personnel costs, that makes sense. But really – its not the Java technology per se – more the cost of developing and supporting a Java environment assuming that all else equal, we are comparing same skill levels of .NETer developers with Java developers. But I do wonder if as .NETers get bought up, competitive market pressure will negate the cost benefit. Frank – what’s your take on the Java v .NET debate?