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Comment by oldmanjay | Hacker News Reader

In the same paragraph you indicate that Oracle and other companies paid for people to work on open source projects, then bemoan that companies get the work for free. The signal is a little mixed, care to clarify your stance on this?

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Some engineers got paid by oracle to work on open source software. But there are still contributions from others who weren't paid by oracle, and yet oracle is extracting a lot of profit from said software (more than what they paid, because of the 'free' contributions from the unpaid engineers).

And everybody is wealthier as a consequence.

Oracle's clients pay less for a solution than they would otherwise, Oracle can compete on this area, some engineers get paid by Oracle to improve a commons, and everybody else gets a more functional system for free.

Ok, maybe somebody worked there against their best interest, but that somebody wasn't coordinated by any big corporation, and should look onto fixing himself only. The ecosystem as a whole is healthy.

>And everybody is wealthier as a consequence.

Well, except for those using Java.

Because Oracle screwed it up.

> Because Oracle screwed it up.

I am quite involved in the Java community and I don't see it. How did Oracle screw it up?

Support for mobile OSes.

You could have had JIT/AOT for Windows Phone and AOT compiler for iOS, but they never cared.

Now C++ and C# reign as the languages to go for portable mobile native apps.

This may well have been a mistake, but it is being addressed now, though probably not aggressively enough. Also, depending on how Google integrates OpenJDK into Android, we may soon have Java (real Java, that is) on the world's leading mobile platform.

So far Google has been integrating OpenJDK 7, still curious to see if they say anything at Google IO.

How is it being addressed?

You mean the communication to leave to the community the porting of OpenJDK to mobile platforms? Or having the RoboVM guys at JavaONE, but giving them zero support other than publicity?

I am not confident that Google will move away from their fork, most likely they will adopt something else, specially with ChromeOS and Android merging.

> How is it being addressed?

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mobile/

Well, how involved are you? Did you see much good work this last 5-6 years from the part of Oracle? Could there be anything more they could do to downplay Java and alienate the community?

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2987529/java/insider-oracle...

https://jaxenter.com/oracle-and-javas-planned-obsolescence-1...

http://fortune.com/2015/09/07/oracle-cuts-java-execs/

http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-close-look-at-how-oracle-inst...

http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/09/oracle-purges-java-evangel...

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2469593/open-source-too...

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/11/apache...

https://dzone.com/articles/oracle-announces-jigsaw-delays-pu...

https://jaxenter.com/even-if-oracle-is-losing-interest-in-ja...

http://alvinalexander.com/java/doug-lea-leaving-java-communi...

I am very involved, and I've seen plenty of good work, from Java 8, through the upcoming Valhalla and Panama, and to the amazing work on Graal, which is probably the biggest breakthrough in compiler technology in the past decade. Doug Lea is still working as tirelessly as ever on java.util.concurrent, and while letting the evangelists go was bad PR, it really changed little wrt to technology investment. There have been some missteps and setbacks, but while making some noise, they have been few. Don't forget that Java is huge; probably the largest standardized language ecosystem ever, and not all of its many corners can always be covered well. And when an ecosystem is nearly ten million users strong, even one percent of disappointed users is larger than most other languages' entire ecosystem.

Some resources have been taking away from Valhalla and Panama, and Java 9 has been delayed.

But that is NOT what TFA is about. That is about Java EE, which Oracle suddenly stopped dedicating resources to, but in a completely silent way.

Java SE may be next. We don't know that yet. There are some signs, but they don't matter at the moment. What matters at the moment is Java EE.

Plus, things like Desktop Java were ignored, and applets silently killed (even if it was their time, this was caused by years of neglect and security issues, and it screwed up people depending on them).

That is all hardly Oracle's fault.

Yeah, java. What a failure. Oracle killed it. Rip

Anybody said Java is a failure? Or that Oracle "killed" it? Even if they did, it would take a couple decades to get at the level Cobol today it.

What I said is Oracle screwed Java up.

By alienating the community, By not caring for security (except after all the huge negative press each time), By not innovating at a decent pace, By falling back on promises, By killing off the evangelists, By ignoring the mobile space, and in several other ways.

Not to mention the bloody Java "API" lawsuit...

> And everybody is wealthier as a consequence.

Except some got wealthier than others.

What's wrong with that?

No!

How would closed, proprietary software help?

No, the ecosystem is not healthy. Idealistic people are exploited, business as usual. It appears healthy for some Silicon Valley parasites who live in a bubble.

Let the others eat cake.

"Oracle's clients pay less for a solution..."

Not something you read every day!

If you list the Fortune 50 you will find that they all get huge benefit from Open Source. I've worked with Wall Street Banks, Monsanto, NSA, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and other companies which are extracting incredible profits from our society - often at a great cost to our society. Does it make sense to give free help to those who harm?

You've worked for all those bad companies, making money while providing them services, and you want to pin the blame on Open Source Software?

I'm still having a hard time understanding what you're saying with regards to Oracle. Oracle does indeed contribute a lot to OSS (mostly due to their acquisition of Sun), but it is also one of those "rich companies" and owned by multi-billionaires who extract most value from OSS. So what exactly are you saying?

I'm not really trying to say a lot with respect to Oracle. Except perhaps that their interest in Open Source is really not philosophical - it is strictly profit driven. That has real implications to those who adopt Open Source or view it from a philosophical perspective.

The prevailing view that corporations benefit society the most simply by focusing on profits for shareholders is almost entirely philosophical (we cannot prove this, although many economists would probably like to).

How would closed, proprietary software make the situation any better?

Free & Open Source software benefits everyone, which sadly includes bad actors and companies you (and maybe I!) don't like. But don't forget about the "everyone" part, which is the most important one!

Not always - I can't see FOSS like Hadoop or Spark benefitting anyone except large corporations and (maybe) universities.

Of course, not everything is useful in the same way. In any case, being useful to public universities alone is a big win.

But in my opinion, any software being FOSS is benefitial, even if you cannot deploy it yourself for your toy projects. If anything, you get to play with it or learn from its source. Maybe parts of it are useful to you for your own project. You cannot do this easily (if at all) with closed proprietary software.

Governments are large organizations that are supposed to represent and benefit everyone.

> Free & Open Source software benefits everyone

Good software benefits everyone.

Whether it's open source or not is irrelevant.

I disagree, good software doesn't necessarily benefit everyone, and when it does, there are different degrees of benefit. I cannot benefit from software I can't look at or use.

It is definitely not irrelevant whether software is FOSS or not. It's the whole point of the GNU project, the FSF and of the Free and Open Source software movements. I'm not going to write a manifesto about the reasons here, but surely you must be aware a lot has been written about this in the last few decades that cannot be dismissed with a flippant "it's irrelevant".

I think we get too caught up in binary thinking - why limit our choices to the current definition of Open Source. Isn't it possible to redefine open source using laws which could be implemented by the government? We could simply ask ourselves "What is good for our society and the world" and then work to define Open Source to fit that model. At any rate, I don't believe that we should be giving free software to companies which are helping to undermine the values of our society. On the other hand, I would like to see all software be free to everybody who is trying to help or trying to learn. We have to stop thinking in the current dichotomy.

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