Java was not rescued by Oracle. There was never any danger of Java going away or not having a proper sponsor. If anything was 'rescued', it was the SPARC/Solaris division of Sun.
>At the time, and that is still the case today, Sun / Oracle was the single largest contributor to the Java Ecosystem.
So what? What does that have to do with what I argued?
>Java will surely live but will it thrive without all those investment?
Are you really trying to make the argument that had Oracle not bought Sun, that Java, one of the most popular programming languages, would have gone away?
Heh. OK. Oracle clearly saved Java, the most popular programming language in the world, which also drives much of corporate and government infrastructure. We live in different realities. This idea is so silly I'm not even sure if you're serious, given that SUN's troubles at the time are a matter of historical record. Java was never the problem. In fact, it was SUN's most highly valued asset. SUN never recovered after the dot com crash and industry transition to x86 and Linux, all of which led to the death of SPARC and Solaris. But let's leave it at that.
>as proven by the high performance JIT and GC implementation available for Ruby and Python by the community.
It's almost like interpreted dynamic languages are not quite as conducive to the same kind of optimizations as a statically typed compiled language. JavaScript, another interpreted dynamic language, did have massive amount of resources poured into its JIT and GC implementation. No question there were meaningful performance gains. Is it faster than Java? No. Is it ever going to be faster? No, not unless the language compromises on its dynamic nature.
And you're still chasing this red-herring. I never argued that FOSS can do a better job at evolving a programming language runtime, than a corporate sponsor. Why are you harping on that as if that is an argument to support the idea that java was in trouble and needed a bailout from Oracle?
I made no statement about who contributed to Java and how much. So what does that have to do with anything?
Are you actually making the argument that had Oracle not bought Sun that Java, one of the most widely used commercial programming language then and now, would have .. what? Gone away? Disappeared?
> Basically you want free beer like Linux? Get a distribution from OpenJDK.
After the Oracle lawsuit, why should people feel safe believing that Oracle will respect the terms of the license instead of trying to extract more money and subject you to a costly lawsuit?
That's still not an answer. You're avoiding the question and... I don't know, answering some other question that no one asked, it looks like.
If a company has the option between OpenJDK and its "free" license or paying Oracle for a different license, why would anyone feel safe choosing the former, given that when you deal with Oracle, you deal with the risk of wasting as much money or more to defend yourself in court than the price of Oracle's paid option? Open source licenses are only as good as as the belief by the licensing party that the terms of the license mean anything.
Every seems to be being snarky, but on the off chance you care about the actual pricing, and assuming you're talking about Oracle's JDK and not OpenJDK: Oracle's JDK is free to use. You can pay for support if you want, which gives you the bleeding edge security patches immediately (without support you can upgrade every six months to get the all patches). The pricing for support is calculated by CPU core count I believe. So if you're using Java in production on 100 cores, that's going to be more expensive than 10. I don't have the specific numbers off the top of my head though.
It's worth pointing out that with Oracle's new Java licensing model whether something is free on charge depends on a number of things including how Oracle thinks it's being deployed.
The Oracle JDK is indeed free of charge for developing aplications, but running that app using Oracle Java on a server as opposed to a desktop needs a paid license subscription & generates exposure to Oracle license audits.
Many, many firms are now using OpenJDK and the like, and have policies against even downloading Oracle's version.
I was not trying be to snarky. I was genuinely curious to know how it is priced after the oracle acquisition. As a language that I am most used to, I wanted to evaluate how much it'd cost (a rough estimate based on cores/users) if I were to launch a web service based on Java.
OpenJDK is Oracle's free, open-source implementation of the Oracle JDK. It is where Oracle does all of its JDK development. You can use it with no restrictions. If you want to pay for support, you can pay Oracle or any of several other companies that package up and support the OpenJDK. If you choose to pay Oracle, you'll get the Oracle JDK which is identical to the OpenJDK except for a couple of error messages and the ID string.
Not if you want to use Oracle's JVM to run something on anything but a laptop or desktop. They will absolutely want you to pay for that and will make sure you do.
Well, on the other hand OpenJDK is 99% Oracle's work repackaged.
If Oracle decided to stop putting out new FOSS-licenced versions, there would be no new OpenJDK releases (since all the core Java devs are Oracle employees).
So it's like a no-community project, where you get a dump of FOSS code every now and then from a vendor.
Oracle seems to pursue GraalVM EE as a way to monetize Java. It would be insane for them to change the license, piss off companies with deep pockets, risk a hard fork and see most employees working on the JDK leave.
>In recent Java versions, there's roughly 20% of external contributions:
Have to check your link to find out, but is it by number or by impact?
(Asking cause many projects have seemingly many "external contributors" but if one looks almost all real work happens by a core team, and the external contributors just do some change here and there, or even clerical work, like fixing comments and documentation and such).
The post measures by issue count, though not all issues are equal.
> Of the 2,136 JIRA issues marked as fixed in Java 15, 1,702 were completed by people working for Oracle, while 434 were contributed by individual developers and developers working for other organizations.
A correction - all the core Java developers are paid by Oracle to develop Java. I doubt that Oracle would win anything, by abandoning OpenJDK.
And now - they can't. Companies that are able to maintain Java are X times larger than Oracle and the core team would easily be rehired by IBM, Google, Aamazon, Facebook, Apple, etc...
None of the companies you listed would gain much over current model. They would rather move to different technologies in case Java is abandoned.
> Companies that are able to maintain Java are X times larger than Oracle
With exception of maybe IBM which anyway is crapping out, none of the other owe their business success to directly to Java based product or services. If Java were to be abandoned they can easily migrate / rewrite their internal tools / products to a different platform even if it takes 5-10 years. It is not like current prod systems will stop working just by announcement.
Also to think further Oracle abandons Java , Amazon and Google would have huge incentive to either charge lot more for Java on cloud or redirect their customers to alternatives.
> They would rather move to different technologies in case Java is abandoned.
They had the opportunity to do so for at least a decade now, but they didn't. Google, even after the massive row with Oracle, still uses Java extensively. Still has new projects written in Java(or running on JVM). Having a big legal battle between Google and Oracle would surely have dissuaded FAANGs from starting Java projects, right? Nope... You're flat out wrong.
> Java were to be abandoned they can easily migrate / rewrite
That's one delusional world you live in.
> It is not like current prod systems will stop working just by announcement.
And what makes you think that those big boys aren't going to be interested in maintaining JVM?
As opposed to which big open-source project? Do you really believe linux is a few individuals’ work? Just look at which companies pay the contributors.
Java is as open source and still has multiple implementations available, even Microsoft is now a Java vendor (after having bought jClarity).
Basically you want free beer like Linux? Get a distribution from OpenJDK.
You want support Red-Hat/SuSE style? There is Oracle, and a plenty of other vendors happy to sell JDKs with support.