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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Every time people suggest OpenJDK to move away from Oracle, they should learn who actually writes OpenJDK code.

The roadmap is quite clear, Java 11 planned to be released in September, will be the next LTS release.

Business will have one year to migrate to 10, used the 11 preview on their test systems, and eventually migrate to the next LTS release.

I applaud Oracle here, business don't do anything unless pushed to do so.

I still have to occasionally program against Java 1.4, just because there is this forgotten server no one wants to touch.

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There's good business opportunity is to fork OpenJDK and backport important patches. May be IBM or Zulu will do that. Might become new de facto JDK. I know that I'm stuck with Java 8 for years even if it means that I won't upgrade JDK at all.

IBM preferred to let Oracle buy Sun than invest into covering their offer.

Azul is trying to diversify their business as not everyone is willing to pay for their GC implementation. Not sure how well they would do as Java stewards.

If you are willing to pay for support then why not just buy it from Oracle?

Another company might be less greedy or offer it for free (to promote their other products or just as a good will).

The only other companies that have been proposed all make money by charging for support.

And since when is charging money for work done 'greedy'?

I don't see how OpenJDK is different from other big open source community-managed projects. If Oracle is not willing to maintain an up-to-date version of the JDK, there are a lot of businesses big and small, as well as individuals, who will be interested in creating a governing body to oversee bugfixing in old releases, potentially even taking over stewardship altogether (which is probably a good idea, given Oracle's dubious reputation and this boundary hostile move).

For starters none of those projects has parity with Java's JIT and GC implementations.

Those that kind of do, are sponsored by corporations not much different from Oracle, other than some geek love.

Finally, Oracle was the company that rescued Java, so blame the others for not caring enough.

> For starters none of those projects has parity with Java's JIT and GC implementations.

Aren't you forgetting about Linux, Firefox and Mesa graphics library to name a few? You seem to imply that all open source is amateur's work by definition, which is obviously wrong, as many large-profile, complex open-source projects are maintained by professional developers, employed by powerful companies to work for the benefit of the whole industry. Besides, it's one thing to develop GC from scratch and another to maintain an existing one and backport fixes.

> Those that kind of do, are sponsored by corporations not much different from Oracle, other than some geek love.

There is nothing wrong in being sponsored by corporations, especially if it's a collaboration between several players, as opposed to a single one. The problems only start when these corporations overtake the maintenance completely and then start leveraging it against the users.

> Oracle was the company that rescued Java

Pah'lease! Rescued... Oracle just bought Sun's intellectual property and trademarks in hopes of monetizing them later. Guess what, later is now! The only reason Java was in trouble during Sun's time in the first place is because of Sun's proprietary attitude under the pretense of safeguarding the Java standard and preventing fragmentation. It's that attitude that first caused the Java development to stall when Sun ran out of steam and now it has brought us to the spot where the project maintainer is denying us security patches.

Linux, Firefox and Mesa wouldn't be where they are without the generous contributions from IBM, SGI, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, HP, Cray and many others.

If it would be only about donations and community, I would still be using Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, or any other commercial UNIX platform.

It doesn't matter what were their ultimate reasons, no other company besides IBM bothered to make an offer, and even IBM did not care enough to cover Oracle's offer.

Google was specially bad in this, after having torpedoed Sun with Android and not caring one second to rescue it. Why bother they already had gotten what they wanted and with luck they might just managed to get off with it.

So yes, Oracle did rescue Java, if it was up the community, maybe we would have an open source version stuck with Java 6 features and that was all about it.

GCJ has proven how much the community is able to achieve regarding Java high quality implementations.

You are drawing conclusions based on arbitrary facts. GCJ has always been going against the grain both politically and technologically, no wonder it ended up where it did. There are strong efforts and weak efforts. The fact that many projects fail doesn't mean that it's a bad idea for this specific project to be maintained by a community.

And no, "community" doesn't necessarily mean unaffiliated developers, they can be affiliated, like I have already stated many times, and still collectively considered a community. Open source can be a collaborative effort by major players or it can be a hopeless attempt to catch up with such. For the last 15 years or even more, it has been a common practice to commoditize technologies that are widely used across the industry. Java fully fits the above description, so maintaining it by a strong community effort would be a natural fit. Actually, from what I know, it almost works like that right now, we just need to take the licensing power from Oracle's greedy hands and keep the process the same as it is.

Except that your beloved "Java community" working on the OpenJDK and driving JEP's implementation are mostly the ex-Sun employees now Oracle employees, that no one else bothered to offer an job.

That can change.

Upgrading to a new JDK every 6 months is pushing a bit too hard if you ask me. In case of JDK 8 -> JDK 11 (LTS to LTS) you even have only 4 months.

A new JDK may have breaking changes, which may require code changes, acceptance testing, deployment to many customer sites. It is not unusual for that process to take 6 to 12 months, and you certainly do not want to repeat that process every 6 months.

So better start today making sure it runs on Java 10.

It doesn't need to be deployed straight into production.

Surely there will be very few things to fix by the time 11 is ready.

Preview releases exist exactly for that.

We don't need Python 2/3 dichotomy on Java.

My main point with Java upgrades is not source code, but different behaviour in production. Or some side effects you didn't get in testing.

You don't test just for a couple of hours.

One sets up a test machine as part of the continuous integration worflow.

Yes, but with every large applications I've been bitten by non-functional problems in production with major Java migrations, as non-functional testing is usually not as extensive as user testing.

The answer was to:

"So better start today making sure it runs on Java 10. It doesn't need to be deployed straight into production."

Making sure it runs on Java 10 is not the problem, I expressed myself too fuzzy.

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