[bratao]

Oracle was responsible for my first complaint, while I was doing my first internship in the US. Because once I used my private laptop with the VirtualBox Extension Pack while connected to the work network. The incredible legal/licensing team got in touch because they identified this use. Since than I avoid Oracle like plague.

[nohankyou]

They just went ahead and sent us an invoice. Sales by extortion... so I made sure to replace our JRE in places (where Oracle snuck in) and uninstall anything else Oracle across our fleet.

[naikrovek]

yep, same. Oracle can die in a fire.

[birracerveza]

Oracle MUST die in a fire.

[msla]

ōrāculum delenda est!

[pjmlp]

And who would take their place moving Java forward?

Since Sun went down, it hardly goes over 10% of external contributions, and no one else cared about getting hold of Java 6.

[kabes]

So both java and oracle die. Seems like a double win.

[pjmlp]

I guess JetBrains should hurry up with Kotlin/Native then.

Maybe Google or Amazon could come up with GoSpring as well.

[mdaniel]

A great deal of Spring is based on classpath scanning and reflection; I don't think any such thing as ServiceLoader exists in golang, and my experience with the golang reflection has been "this is clearly solving some other problem than the one I have"

[tezza]

Amazon Corretto, Google… java and JVM run deep many big places

[viraptor]

> And who would take their place moving Java forward?

Dotnet - it's already ahead, and the existing software can stay in the current Java version. (I'm joking (but not really))

[pjmlp]

I do .NET and Java for 20 years now, there are so many workloads where .NET still doesn't matter at all.

Why do you think Microsoft is now back in Java land with their own distribution, after everything that happened with Sun's lawsuit?

[viraptor]

> Why do you think Microsoft is now back in Java land with their own distribution

Because they have enough engineers to throw at any big environment where they can potentially expand in the future and having own distribution for an app layer lays foundations for new Azure services? (edit: checked after the response; first paragraph: "Java at Microsoft spans from Azure to Minecraft, across SQL Server to Visual Studio Code" - yeah, I think I got it)

[gruturo]

I'd wager external contributions are reflecting people's opinion of Oracle. I'd never contribute to something they own.

[pjmlp]

Yet they gladly profit from it.

It is like all Sun freeloaders complaining about Oracle buying the company, while no one else bothered to get them out of trouble.

[bayindirh]

> And who would take their place moving Java forward?

The fleet of companies who use Java extensively and care about it's future.

Java has a huge ecosystem to put it lightly. Oracle is not the single point of failure.

[pram]

Oh yeah when I worked at Oracle they'd do these kinds of shakedowns even on stuff people were paying to host. This was pre OCI though, dunno if they're still doing it. Felt like something the mob would do.

Nice company you have there, shame if something were unlicensed eh?

[denkmoon]

It's a shame that Oracle make their products toxic because this particular one is truly fantastic.

[obtino]

It wasn't originally their product. It came with the Sun Microsystems acquisition. Sun themselves acquired Virtualbox close to selling to Oracle. Sun never monetized their products well, hence their demise.

[29athrowaway]

Sun and SGI were once profitable but once Linux gained traction it was over.

They had no option to be assimilated by the Borg.

[actionfromafar]

I recall SGI were eaten more by Windows NT + off the shelf OpenGL graphics card than Linux. (But Linux also, of course. All non display output which was ran on SGI/Irix could be ran cheaper on Linux.)

[pjmlp]

Ironically they were contributors to their own downfall.

[toyg]

That was a last-gasp attempt to regain relevancy. It really looked desperate, there was no real business plan behind it and the market could tell.

[pjmlp]

Your're missing their contributions to run Linux on their hardware, back when it wasn't seen as a danger to their bottom line.

[adfm]

Cheap OpenGL hardware, from what I recall.

[obtino]

I was happy to pay the USD30 they charged back then, but they wanted a minimum order of 100 units!

[Aachen]

Same still last year, except now the unit cost nearly doubled. We pay for a handful of VMware licenses instead now, which is 10x cheaper (more expensive per license, but you don't need a literal hundred of them). I'm convinced that the only reason for this is so that Oracle can send invoices to companies using the evaluation license for this ridiculous minimum amount without it seeming worth a challenge in court when one only has four machines and doesn't need a hundred licenses.

[samsaga2]

Something similar happened to me, but with Qt. I installed Qt Open Source at home to compile OpenMSX debugger (a hobby project to which I have contributed). I don't know why I used my work email account instead of my personal one. The next day at work, we received a call from Qt with threats saying that we had to buy a licence.

[bayindirh]

> The incredible legal/licensing team got in touch because they identified this use.

If you know how many companies have this tech for license enforcement, you'd be more than amazed. Seriously.

[ChrisRR]

What's the issue? As far as I know the extension pack is a commercial piece of software and you have to pay to use it for work.