I’ve updated my package of the Amazon EC2 API Tools for Debian [1]. Now it uses the Sun JDK. Kaffe doesn’t work due to not supporting annotations, I haven’t filed a bug because Kaffe is known to be incomplete.
GCJ doesn’t work, not sure why so I filed Debian bug #501743 [3].
I don’t think that Java is an ideal language choice for utility programs. It seems that Perl might be a better option as it’s supported everywhere and has always been free (the Sun JVM has only just started to become free). The lack of freeness of Java results in a lower quality, and in this case several hours of my time wasted.