Bryan Varner has apparantly gotten back in to the Java port and is corresponding with Ian Murdock about this topic. Hopefully it will lead to something interesting. Also it seems that Bryan is looking for co-developers. So if anyone has an idle hand and want to help him out, give him a holler.

More here: 

http://bryan.varnernet.com/2007/06/27/ian-murdock-father-of-debian-opensource-savior-to-sun/ 

and 

http://bryan.varnernet.com/2007/06/29/openjdk-how-open/