Runtimes and Open Source?

Caoch93 asks: "I recently read the Mono project's rationale and have found it compelling in the way it shows the Mono project as being the result of engineering concerns rather than concerns of siding with Microsoft. One thing that it has strongly bolstered in me is my belief that runtimes which interpret intermediary languages are going to play an increasingly important role in programming in the years to come, and it makes me wonder- should the open source community consider developing its own runtime (ala JVM or CLI) which would thus be totally open to the public? Currently, it seems like the options for a runtime are the JVM, which is still dominated by Sun with respect to its design future, and CLI, which is an ECMA standard but is critical to the Microsoft .NET platform. It would seem to me that having an open source runtime (and languages that compile to it) could be critical to moving with the times, and the freedom from proprietary influences would seem to be important to keeping such a system truly in the interest of its programmers. I don't know...is CLI already achieving this? I an ECMA standard enough, or is an ECMA standard really just codification of proprietary interests. If so, should the open source community consider its own itermediary language runtime...and what would be proper goals for such a project?"