According to some at the Professional Developer's Conference, Microsoft is not only submitting C# to ECMA as a standard, but also the Common Language Runtime. With CLR published as an open spec, the door is open for others to port it to other OS's, and to compile other languages to run on it.

See ECMA site for the article titled "Two New Projects":

http://www.ecma.ch/ecma1/news/news.htm