I work in a different Oracle niche and the message is the same: nothing matters but cloud. If a product can be moved to the cloud, good; if it can't, it will be killed. On-premise versions are pretty much all in legacy-mode, getting patches that pay lip-service to the idea of hybrid setups, but 90% of development resources are busy on cloud-related stuff.
Somehow, the current Oracle leadership believes they should become "AWS for the enterprise", and in traditional Oracle style, they will pull all stops (and cut all corners) to get there. If you don't like it, that's the door. "Java everywhere" advocates are now surplus to requirements.
There has been a lot of teeth gritting over how locked into AWS certain parts of a customers company has become, using their API's, their services, and with no real way to move away if anything ever happened.
AWS has already perfected vendor lock-in, so I doubt Oracle can make it much worse, beyond their normal trick of de-certifying their products on competing platforms.
Doesn't matter, its the outsourcing of this decade. Every board wants to be in the cloud, because it gives the (stock) market the impression the company is going places.
And everyone from Oracle to MS, and Google as well, wants to be the one to rent them that cloud, Hotel California style.
Thats why MS has changed their tune regarding Linux, as long as it is running in a VM on top of their Azure service...
I can imagine his job being hard, still officially having to evangelise Java EE, while simultaneously knowing all his work is for nothing.
The problem is that it has been brewing for some time that Oracle is severely neglecting Java (EE). See
* http://www.infoworld.com/article/2987529/java/insider-oracle... * https://jaxenter.com/oracle-and-javas-planned-obsolescence-1...
A little while earlier the Java SE evangelists had been let go:
* http://fortune.com/2015/09/07/oracle-cuts-java-execs * http://www.infoworld.com/article/2980686/java/sources-oracle...
But, the infoworld articles mentioned unnamed former Oracle employees. And people brushed them off as being FUD spread by Pivotal (the Spring company, Java EE's major competitor).
But now we have for the first time I belief an actual name of an actual Oracle employee, and also not just any employee. He may not be as direct about it as we all wish, but IMHO it gives much credibility to the previous reports.
If you're interested in the topic, look at the various Java EE mailing lists, and look in the repositories for the implementation code. You'll see there's plenty of evidence of Oracle suddenly doing very little for Java EE:
* https://github.com/spericas/ozark/graphs/contributors * https://github.com/javaserverfaces/mojarra/graphs/contributo... * https://twitter.com/jms_spec/status/689762921988132864 * https://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/ec-public/materia...
And then look at the GlassFish 5 (Java EE 8 RI) builds, an automated zombie process with not a single Java EE 8 commit yet, and frankly almost none commits at all (see changes file for every build):
* http://download.oracle.com/glassfish/5.0/nightly/index.html
The story is the same for no matter what Java EE list or repo you look at, with the exception of CDI which is lead by Red Hat.