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Comment by abp | Hacker News Reader

First: Further, the project communities of the ASF, home to Apache Tomcat, Ant, Xerces, Geronimo, Velocity and nearly a 100 mainstay java components have implemented countless JSRs and serve on and contribute to many of the JCPs technical expert groups.

And then:

To that end, our representative has informed the JCP's Program Management Office of our resignation, effective immediately. As such, the ASF is removing all official representatives from any and all JSRs. In addition, we will refuse any renewal of our JCP membership and, of course, our EC position.

Holy crap! That just sounds like Java is really bleeding now. Anyone knows how significant the real impact of leaving representatives on the JSRs is?

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Not really. JSRs have never been leading the innovation in Java world: Ant, Maven, Velocity, Spring, Hibernate, Grails, Hadoop, GWT, Android, Struts, Wicket, Eclipse - none of them started as a JSR.

The only JSR that matter is JavaSE and I don't see it having technical problems. JavaME is dying and Spring showed JavaEE how things should be done so they are catching up now.

A counterpoint: On the technical front, I see JavaSE/the JRE falling hopelessly behind C# and the CLR -- fear of Microsoft and distrust of Mono have kept the playing field a bit closer to being level, but I don't see Oracle as an organization that can really take advantage of that.

You are right, and the fear & distrust go both ways. The .NET "community" is almost entirely Microsoft fans and a good number of shills. The shills are rabidly anti-FOSS, the Microsoft employees are about evenly divided between FOSS-hostile and MS-provincial (with a tiny minority pro-FOSS), and the rest are just unaware of anything that Microsoft isn't hyping.

It's very hard to get momentum behind a free software project on .NET, and once you do Microsoft and their shill army kills it by reinvention, heavy promotion of their vaporware, and badmouthing the competition.

It's really hard to work against the culture, and the dominant .NET culture sees Redmond as the One True Source for anything worth using.

fear of Microsoft and distrust of Mono have kept the playing field a bit closer to being level, but I don't see Oracle as an organization that can really take advantage of that

Honestly, as someone who has no interest in Microsoft technologies and distrusts Mono, but who likes the idea of a batteries-included, CTO-friendly, cross-platform, JIT-compiling VM with a huge userbase and oodles of libraries, I am feeling a little lost now. Not that Java is going to die quickly -- I'm still learning Scala and expect that to be a good investment for a few years to come -- but it's starting to look like Java is a platform with a lot less future than I expected.

I'm still learning Scala and expect that to be a good investment for a few years to come

First let me disclaimer that this is totally my perspective on the subject but as a decision maker in a company that is now looking to move on and believes that this is the fatal shot to Java, I wanted to say that for us we feel that with the JVM shenanigans that any technology that runs on the JVM is in danger of Oracle's legal reach. After kicking this one around a lot among our peers we are hopeful that a language that run on the LLVM makes it to the forefront as a replacement.

It will be many years before a new platform can match the libraries available on the JVM. Such a loss :-(

Yep needless to say, I am pretty concerned right now. I think the irony of the whole situation is that much of the community expected this from Mono.

The only JSR that matter is JavaSE and I don't see it having technical problems.

I don't know what you mean by that. Just have a look at what JSRs JDK 7 consists of:

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/

Now imagine some of Apaches representatives were spec leads on some JSRs. Thats a serious threat to a JSR then. Spec leads are not easy to find. Participators in a JSR can go with important knowledge on the topic, too.

Java SE is almost 100% designed and implemented by Oracle. (The only exception I can think of is Doug Lea's concurrency work.) This is a problem in some sense, but also a solution: the JCP was never really a bottleneck for Java SE so its implosion can't delay Java 7/8.

one has to wonder with Microsoft's new found success in (open) Kinect if it won't translate to something more liberating to the rest of their products.

Presumably the already late Java 7/8 will be further delayed.

Practically, I don't think it really matters at all. But it's a very significant symbolic move. It sends a message about where the Java community is now in relation to Oracle.

Of more concern will be Apache's attitude to new development in Java. Will they continue to use it and to make cool new stuff in Java, or is this a breaking point for them in terms of using the tech?

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