They do slightly different things. I think each can benefit by incorporating the main idea of the other:

- Working on multiple projects who need different JVMs running at the same time can be a hassle in clove (you have to create a service for each), so it can be fixed by doing that the same way drip does.

- Running scripts and having a persistent JVM is still very useful, and clove (albeit I haven't cleaned up its code properly) gives a terminal into the JVM, really fast. So, drip can use the same technique (passing capabilities; a *nix feature) to let you hook into a JVM very quickly. [see the "screenshot" part at the bottom of http://hovel.ca/clove]