Could someone be so kind to explain why this is bad for Java instead being bad for patents? I guess we all agree that software patents are bad. This issue seems to be just about them. Why is Java dragged into this? (Genuine curiosity.)
* Companies (more specially: Enterprises) must trust you or they won't use your technology
* Library makers must have trust in you or they will not continue building libraries for your platform
The problem is a middle-term one: open-source will shy away from it (and the Apache/JBoss libraries are A Big Reason to use Java), academia will begin to stop teaching it (for all the "it doesn't matter what language you use" arguments, there are many mediocre programmers who can only handle the one thing they are taught), and new company projects will try and avoid the license fees and choose unencumbered languages. That sort of thing won't hurt Oracle now, but it will in five to ten years.
Heck, if Microsoft ever saw the woods from the trees and freed C#, bought the Mono devs and pushed the .NET ecosystem to other platforms, creating a sea of programmers that use their language alone, Oracle could feel the results of this in less than three years.
Microsoft's conversion to open source is going to have to be really really convincing after yesterday's precedent.
The language itself has shown that it probably isn't going to get past version 7, and even getting that through was by cutting a whole lot of features (lol closures lol?). However, that would just mean Java faded into insignificance when a new leader emerged. I think this may well have fallen to Scala given time. Oracle is unnecessarily hastening Java's demise, and from my limited understanding of the reporting, might be taking the JVM with it. That's a really bad thing for software development in general.
11. Its daddy is in a pinch. Sun's business model is being undermined on two
fronts. Cheap Intel processors, of the same type used in desktop machines, are
now more than fast enough for servers. And FreeBSD seems to be at least as good
an OS for servers as Solaris. Sun's advertising implies that you need Sun
servers for industrial strength applications. If this were true, Yahoo would be
first in line to buy Suns; but when I worked there, the servers were all Intel
boxes running FreeBSD. This bodes ill for Sun's future. If Sun runs into
trouble, they could drag Java down with them.
There are 3 things Java the Langauge JVM and the JDK (not sure if this is the write name i just meen the libs around it)
> If Sun runs into trouble, they could drag Java down with them.
[ 'trouble' could of course include 'nonexistence' or 'sleeps with the enemy' ]
All things being equal, Oracle suing somebody and doing it in part because of "java" does have to make you take notice if you do anything with it. It's not like there is some open standard for Java and 10 different yet fairly equal implementations to choose from like it is with a C compiler. For serious java work, there still are maybe 3 implementations (Sun's, IBM's and maybe OpenJDK?) and they share some common components and ancestry.
Time will tell though, we'll see what happens. The java haters will continue to hate it, the java lovers will continue to love it and then those in the middle will have a raised eye brow and sort of pay attention.