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Comment by reacweb | Hacker News Reader

When you give money to redhat, you buy insurance that if you encounter a problem, they will support you. It is expencive, but there is clearly a lot of work involved in producing new release. IMHO redhat deserves its money.

When you give money to Oracle, you are financing lawyers who try to find the best way to make you pay more without improving the software.

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There is lots of juice in Oracle SQL that even PostgreSQL is lacking.

GraalVM would never exist with weekend developers.

Top level JIT and almost non stoping GC algorithms don't get implementated with late nighters.

Except now you're paying IBMs lawyers ;)

"IMHO redhat deserves its money". I agree. But the vast majority of people employ CentOS which is redhats derivative.

Oracle engineers work hard on java and deserve their money but the vast majority of people employ OpenJDK which is OracleJDKs derivative.

For a long period of time I regarded Oracle as absolutely undeserving owners of the JDK; they didn't write it, it was bought from Sun, they shipped adware in the installer, tried to sue Android out of existence, and were poor stewards of the language.

You wrote in the past tense. Did something change your view?

I lost track of the detail and am vaguely aware of a Java renaissance, but not clear whether that's real or whether Oracle are responsible or whether it's Clojure. So now I don't know whether I have reasons to hate Oracle. But I keep a little resentment warm just in case.

well, with openjdk nobody remembers oracle now. so I guess that changed.

if oracle wanted to continue to be the owners of Java they shouldn't have called their bluff and sued Google.

OpenJDK is mostly developed by Oracle employees. There isn't OpenJDK without them.

Oracle did the right thing against Android J++.

Exactly. I avoid Oracle tech or products for all those reasons plus the fact that dollars to them support their lobbyists and lawyers. Those keep trying to undermine software freedom (esp API ruling) and patent troll successful companies. I refuse to support that kind of company. So, I tell people about EnterpriseDB being Oracle-compatible and cheaper. ;)

Oracle is in the Java world since the early days, they even collaborated with Sun on the whole Java workstation idea of the Network Computer. They used to have their own JVMs.

Also only IBM cared to make an alternative offer to acquire Sun, during the initial round.

The adware contracts were done by Sun, not Oracle.

Google has managed to create Android J++, and as Java developer that cares about the integrity of the Java platform I stand by Oracle.

OpenJDK is a pretty significant rewrite of the Sun/Oracle JDK to stay open and completely GPL.

CentOS is more of a repackaging of Redhat -- the binary files are almost exactly the same there so the comparison isn't quite valid.

You're thinking of GNU Classpath, maybe?

OpenJDK is (a subset of) the Oracle JDK.

> OpenJDK is the official reference implementation of Java SE since version 7.

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Release_of_the_class_l...

> OpenJDK is (a subset of) the Oracle JDK.

Not anymore. With Java 11 it is entirely the same code, at least until somebody takes over maintenance of the Java 11 branch from Oracle in two months.

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