What could Oracle do if they changed their mind? Serious inquiry, IANAL, etc etc... I like to avoid speculating about the intersection of tech and legal issues, but is Scala in a very different place than other languages targeting the JVM? Are there any actual legal issues with writing a compiler that emits Java bytecode? This has been going on for a while, maybe as long as Java's been around. There's even some mention of it in the intro to the JVM spec.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-1.htm...