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Comment by hele7 | Hacker News Reader

> OpenJDK happened on May 8, 2007, that's 10 years ago and you've got companies like Red Hat and IBM collaborating on it. By comparison .NET Core was released 2016, so that's 9 years later.

You're comparing unequal things. OpenJDK was a community effort, while .NET Core is maintained primarily by Microsoft themselves. The correct comparison would be to .NET's community based alternative, which is Mono. Mono in turn had it's initial release in June 30, 2004, which is _13 years ago_, and 3 years before OpenJDK itself.

Further, note that Oracle only open sourced Java a year after Microsoft did .NET Core. One might even argue that Oracle only did so _because_ of .NET Core.

I'll note that I'm replying because I'm getting tired of Oracle's marketing campaigns on this forum.

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> You're comparing unequal things. OpenJDK was a community effort

> The correct comparison would be to .NET's community based alternative, which is Mono.

This is disingenuous at best. OpenJDK was started with a huge codebase from the existing Sun JDK at the time, similar to how .Net core was started with with a Microsoft codebase.

Meanwhile Mono had to be written from scratch and was a far cry from being somewhat compatible for years after it started (e.g. capable of running a Visual Studio compiled .NET GUI program)

> Further, note that Oracle only open sourced Java a year after Microsoft did .NET Core

I'm not sure what you mean by "open source Java" in this context. The Java Community Process was started in 1998, and as said OpenJDK started in 2007. Java EE being open sourced like now would be much more comparable to Microsoft releasing something like Windows Presentation Foundation as open source, as it's a oft-used part of .NET but not part of the language per se.

No, you're wrong. You can compare Mono to GNU Classpath (1998) and the like. But OpenJDK was backed by Sun. They started releasing the source code in 2007. So it's 10 years ago.

You can read it all here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK

OpenJDK would have died already if it wasn't for the Sun devs, nowadays Oracle, being the majority of contributors.

If you want to take mono into account as the first free .net implementation you should take GCJ into account as free Java implementation. GCJ was started in 1998....

"The correct comparison would be to .NET's community based alternative, which is Mono. Mono in turn had it's initial release in June 30, 2004, which is _13 years ago_, and 3 years before OpenJDK itself."

Mono is owned by Ximian, which is now a subsidiary of...Microsoft. This creates the rather odd situation where there are three implementations of .NET, but Microsoft controls all of them.

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