[WorldMaker]

For many years the Wal-Mart purchase of Jet was lauded as a brilliant "acquihire" by Wal-Mart because they had lagged so far behind Amazon technically and Jet gave them the bootstraps to better compete. It has been said that the modern, competitive parts of Wal-Mart's tech platform is largely owed to former Jet engineers and their .NET (especially F#) forward development ideals.

I've never worked for Wal-Mart, I've only seen PR and blog posts and job postings. That is likely its own spin of what happened, too. But during those years Wal-Mart was seen as a stable "Microsoft shop" in terms of what they were hiring for in software developers (if you didn't mind relocating to Arkansas).

Externally, the Java thing did seem to be a "coup" that came out of the blue. Like I said, the easiest explanation is that Wal-Mart, a company famous for ruthless cost cutting and layoffs, felt like they had milked their acquihire of Jet for just long enough to stay competitive and decided the easiest "exit" for those expensive employees was to force a top-down mandated tech stack change to a known cheaper tech stack and gently encourage them to quit on their own initiative in the chaos. (In that Wal-Mart was already very quick to RTO, they had already played that particular card, many other companies are still palming to cause similar layoffs.)

The Oracle rumors are icing on the cake, sure. But also extremely plausible given that is how Oracle's business works today.