Every time I get to the download page, and despite all the claims around the Community edition OS licenses, it just reminds me who is behind it.
I think the trick is that they might just drop their efforts behind the Community Edition anytime. The Open Source license its not a guarantee. Any Open Source team that would decide to pick up the engineering effort would have them coming around and claiming some kind of license infringement.
Really a shame, actually.
To be honest, I would be much more afraid of google touching an open source project for that matter - they have a much worse track record.
And sued a company for doing their own implementation of Java...
It was simply open up or die.
Google has thousands of open source projects, including the Chromium web browser, the Chromium operating system, the V8 Javascript engine that Node.js depends on, Kubernetes, Golang, the Android OSP, gRPC, Tensorflow, Authenticator (2FA), etc.
The track record you're apparently referring to, of commercial products being discontinued, is not really that relevant to this. The issue in that case is that they are services that users come to depend on, and then are forced to switch away from. There's not really a comparable scenario in open source. The worst case is that the original sponsor stops paying for new development. If the project is viable enough, forks and other sponsors are likely to arise.
The second thing there doesn't seem like a fair criticism of Oracle or any company really. Firstly any company can abandon stuff. There is no expectation that open sourcing something means funding it in perpetuity forever. Look at Google and Facebook, they abandon open source projects at a way higher rate than Oracle has ever done.
And secondly Oracle have actually been very steady hands on the tiller of Java. GraalVM is a very long term project. More than a decade old now. They have been funding long term research programmes like Valhalla. They're still maintaining JavaFX and other large libraries, even when they didn't become super popular. Their attention span is way longer and more stable than the average tech company.
Apache contains a patent grant.
> still maintaining JavaFX and other large libraries, even when they didn't become super popular
They kept JavaFX proprietary for years before opening it up, and they only did so reluctantly—after it was obvious that it was a failure.
There are also some potential patent encumbrances? I know less about that.
I also don't know for sure if IcedTea is still necessary to get a 100% open build of newer versions of Java (I'm still one of those incorrigible elements who's still on Java 8), but, at least historically, there was an appreciable chunk of the official OpenJDK distribution that was not, in actual fact, open.
It died the moment the OpenJDK was released 14 years ago? The issue wasn't the TCK itself, as far as I understand Sun just didn't want to license any Java implementation that could cut into its embedded market and dragged its feet when the community requested an out for the Apache licensed Harmony project. The TCK now seems to be available for any OpenJDK derived implementation[1] in case you want to use official Java trademarks for your implementation.
> I also don't know for sure if IcedTea is still necessary to get a 100% open build of newer versions of Java
I can't actually find anything about IcedTea for any recent OpenJDK, but its wiki page[2] seems to hint at the IcedTea patches were merged back into OpenJDK. Debian and other free software distros also seem fine with distributing current OpenJDK versions instead of reviving gcj to torment their users.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit#T...
Sure, you wouldn't want to share the answers to the drivers license exam...are you saying that they should sell the answers instead? What the actual fuck?
Compare it more, perhaps, to housing codes. . . and imagine if the specification of the housing codes were covered by an (at least ostensibly) democratic process, but the actual housing inspectors all worked for one company, and that company also happened to be the biggest player in the construction business. So the inspector therefore had a clear incentive treat outside construction firms with less than complete fairness.
The whole marketing angle behind GraalVM is that it's a drop-in replacement of your JVM. If things go wrong down the road, what stops you from switching back to an OpenJDK distribution from a 3rd party vendor? Nowadays there are enough companies involved in maintaining OpenJDK and Hotspot... including some that aren't exactly friends with Oracle.
I work in a very slow moving domain where once we get customers, they tend to stick with a product unless you seriously screw them over. This has moved me to evaluating everything I do on at least a 10-year time horizon.
So in the case of GraalVM, what do I think the risk of Oracle wanting to charge me for every CPU in Amazon's data center is in the next 10 years at the worst possible time to have to drop real work and move everything to OpenJDK? I think it's unacceptably high. YMMV.
For GraalVM in particular there's no risk because the EE is basically just the open source CE version + more compiler optimizations. So it truly is a drop in replacement.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
Also if the same morals apply to the remaining contributors of the Linux kernel, better not use it. There are a few other ones that seat at Oracle table, so to speak.
Your parent said: "[Oracle has] built every trap door that they can into it". Oracle doesn't control what goes into Linux; they can only propose, it's Linus who controls what goes in. So your claim that Linux suffers from a similar risk because Oracle et. al. contribute to it is invalid. Contribution != Control
There's a reason you have to give Oracle joint copyright ownership if you contribute to GraalVM. They want to be able to close the source and sell it.
What a completely disingenuous argument without any concrete facts. Also, you can’t close source something with a permissive dual license.
Oracle wanted to do it with MySQL, but their lack of copyright ownership for some parts of a GPL-ed MySQL codebase made it impossible. They fixed that mistake with their new contributor agreement, ensuring that they always have control over your code if you contribute.