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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

I actually thought Oracle's move initially was actually a good thing: It brought some much-needed diversity to OpenJDK builds.

Very pleased to see this move as well. It's taken a very very long time, but it's encouraging to see Oracle finally understand the open source ecosystem.

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Oracle commit 98%+ to the OpenJDK project, that they finished open sourcing and opening up paid only features year to year, to the point where OracleJDK and OpenJDK are pretty much identical.

Contrary to their litigious image, they are more than great stewards of the ecosystem and they do undertake open-source.

Because if they don’t, the Java ecosystem is dead.

Indeed, specially because in spite of all the hate, no other company bothered to acquire Sun assets (with the exception of IBM that quickly withdrew their offer).

Without Oracle, there wouldn't exist Java 17, MaximeVM made into GraalVM, J/Rockit JIT cache as OpenJDK DSA, J/Rockit monitoring as Flight Recorder,....

And everyone could enjoy Java 6 with the JIT and GC improvements the FOSS community is known for, when there isn't some big corp sponsoring the work.

gcc is pretty advanced compiler and, AFAIK, it’s independent from big corporations. I wouldn’t deny the possibility for Java to live under truly open source umbrella.

Almost all of GCC's development is done by employees of big corps, often as their sole job. Red Hat, IBM, etc.

looking at last 1000 commits to gcc, it seems like about 80-90% of emails are associated with "big corps". however, this doesn't tell the whole story. according to https://lwn.net/Articles/867540/, over 85% (100%-6.8%-5.0%-1.6%=86.6%) of Linux kernel changesets are supported by employers, but nobody sensible would claim that Linux is not community developed. whether it is because of historical project culture, or BDFL, or simply a large number of contributing organizations, there is clearly a substantial difference between Linux and OpenJDK development methodology.

Linux is only developed because it helps make money. Most commit as you said are by big corp to support their products, what do you expect ?

A voluntary samaritan committing yet another driver for this IBM entreprise controller, or that Facebook file system?

Linux is "community-of-big-corps"-developed.

The real challenge for Linux will be when Linus retires.

The Linux Foundation was intended act as the backstop here, but it is losing that focus, and I'm not confident that it will remain a trusted steward in the future.

For now, and to the point here, the sheer number of meaningful contributors to Linux is what differentiates it from things like Java and .NET. GCC is somewhere in the middle: less resilient than Linux, but more than Java.

Without Oracle it all could have just evaporated into public domain for other projects and interests to carry forwards. At least, that's what _should_ happen when any company folds, and when products are no longer supported by them. The entire set of copyright specifications, source code, everything should get added to the public stack of records.

I agree that the blossoming of additional JDK distributions, spurred on by Oracle's initial license change, was a good thing. I'm a happy AdoptOpenJDK / Temurin user, at work and at home.

However, I don't see any benefit to this latest change in their stance. Everyone already had to wade their way through the confusion from that initial licensing change, and many (most?) spent a lot of time and effort getting to a new stable configuration on a different distro. Why spend more effort, again, to run back to Oracle JDK? I think most organizations have better things to do than deal with all this.

Also, who's to say Oracle won't change their licensing deal once again for Java 21?

It also avoided licensing accidents. Oracles JDK always came with non free components and making the entire JDK non free made stories claiming that they "accidentally" triggered one of the commercial features and had to pay thousands in licensing fees unlikely.

I don't believe there are any commercial features left in Java 17. The last thing that required a flag to unlock commercial features was Java Flight Recorder, and that's now part of OpenJDK, the "-XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures" is now gone completely from their documentation.

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