"Apple is delighted to announce its continued enthusiasm for the Java platform. Please give us some more time to make sure that everything is as stable as possible on Leopard before we release it to you guys."
That it did not happen is telling. See, if you can make at least 50% of your critics happy again with a simple statement, you would usually do it! Right? So what's going on?
Times have changed! When Apple overtook JDK development on a relatively young OS X, they were the best party for making it
- look sexy
- work throughout substantial future kernel and library changes
Where are we today? The kernel has got a stable API since 10.4. The excellent graphics foundations (Core, QuartzGL, ...) are also stable in both 32 and 64 bit versions. Nowadays it would be much easier for Sun to take over development while using only Apple's public and stable interfaces for talking to the OS. Much less insider knowledge from Apple is needed anymore to get it running smoothly. Most Java 6 Look & Feels could be ported from other JRE's, for Mac native looking stuff Cocoa could be put under the hood.
The negotiations are probably quite hard. Both Sun and Apple's view on Java have changed substantially over the years. Sun open-sourced Java and is earning most of its money on professional grade Java services today. Apple doesn't really need Java at all costs anymore (consumer market share has exploded).
Both parties would need to get straightened out how much future Mac Java efforts are worth to them today (and on Apple's side also old promises to its customers). My guess would be that Sun is going to take over again, sponsored by a free Apple dev team for the initial Core-/Cocoa-JRE port. The number of free devs is going to decrease over time. As soon as Sun's new JRE is able to run completely on top of any provided API's, they can leave their cages in Santa Clara and head for Cupertino again.
