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Oracle To Monetize Java VM
jtotheh writes "According to the Register, Oracle is going to make two tiers of Java Virtual Machine — a free one and a premium paid one. 'Adam Messinger, Oracle vice president of development, told QCon that Oracle plans to offer a "premium" edition of the JDK in addition to the open-source JDK. Both, it seems, will be based on a converged JRockit VM and the Hotspot JVM from Sun Microsystems. The converged JVM will be released under the OpenJDK project. ... Messinger didn't explain how the premium JVM would differ [from] the free version, but the premium edition will likely see performance tuning and tie-ins to Oracle's middleware.'"
Suicide? Sounds they are working on ending Java in a hurry. :(
leather-dog muksihs
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Either Larry Ellison is smart beyond my imagination, or he's too stupid to understand that he's basically killing MySQL, OpenOffice and Java - arguably the three most valuable software assets he bought with Sun.
No, this is the birth of new opportunities in the java landscape, this is a clear sign of Oracle's dedication to the java community. The high-end Mercedes offering will finally allow you to look down on those Fiat drivers and know that your money is well spent.
I'm going to laugh as their Sun acquisition goes down in flames and they end up losing money on the whole deal. They seem to be working to identify any market they can that things are working in and eliminating it. They've done a great job at getting us to work at getting rid of all our Solaris systems as fast as we can.
While in theory this could be fine for Java, I can't imagine it will be being how poorly Oracle has handled things so far. Most likely it'll be a case where the free JVM will be a piece of crap on purpose, and the pay for JVM will be required for anything to work well. Ya, well, that'll fly like not at all. People are not going to go and buy something to make Java apps work better. Perhaps companies who rely heavily on Java on the back end will, but more likely they'll just stop upgrading and switch to something else.
I guess we'll see, maybe I'm wrong and the premium version of the JVM really will provide worthwhile premium features that high end users want, while the normal JVM remains for normal people. However I doubt it. I think they'll try and charge every person for the JVM on their computer, which just won't fly.
... Ballmer et al are wringing their hands nefariously as they see the future of C#'s marketshare increase by leaps and bounds. And that's good for Microsoft in every way, since every application written in C# instead of Java means a license for Windows is being purchased to run each copy of the software. In web apps, it's a server license; in workstation applications, it's a desktop OS license. Either way, it's a win-win for Microsoft, and a massive loss for Oracle.
.Net versions, there would actually be an open source OS alternative to running modern C# applications.
Not that I mind, per se. I prefer C# in every way to Java... but from Oracle's perspective, I don't see how they see this would do anything but hurt Java and their reputation that's rather ubiquitous.
Now if only Mono would get their asses in gear and not lag so far behind
I'm personally hoping someone will come up with an open-source implementation of C# not based on the .NET libraries or the Mono toolkit, but a pure native-code compiler, with selectable manual or automatic memory management. I believe C# is 'better than the orignal' Java. It's only drawback is that it's tied to Micrsoft and Windows.
It's pretty obvious that Oracle is hell bent on either making bumper profits off Java or killing it. They won't have it any other way.
Working in a senior role within a global investment bank, we buy a lot of vendor product, especially from what is now Oracle (Oracle Databases products, Weblogic products, etc.) - and if they want to charge us for the 'better' JVM going forward, no doubt we will pay for it. As will the other banks.
And Oracle knows this. It does not give a shit about small-scale Java customers, but the big corporates, like us, well, they know that even if we decided tomorrow that all new projects were to move to C#, or C++, or Objective-C, or whatever, that it would take a long time to change course, and Oracle can still bill for a long time.
One thing to remember - our bank gets and stays profitable because it pushes a lot of IT outside to third-parties (offshore developers are *much* cheaper than in London and NewYork), and they do not see any problems with getting a global price agreement with companies like Oracle and Microsoft.
Personally, I am brushing up my C++, learning Objective-C and C#, as I think the medium and smaller companies in the market will start to migrate away from Java, as the cost savings of cheaper Java developers is lost once you have pay large amounts for the Java install and licensing.
Stallman wrote the Java trap, and we all laughed. Sun is nice we thought, it'll be ok. We were all wrong. Stallman saw further, he saw that even if Sun was ok, if someone bought Sun, then things could get messy. Welcome to messy.
Yes, because allocating short-lived objects in a modern JVM is a very expensive operation. No, wait, it's an increment on a pointer value stored in a register. Disposing of them is marginally more expensive, but if only very slightly. The cost is roughly equivalent to allocating a C++ object on the stack.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
1000's of big companies (telcos, utilities, retailers, gov, defence) use java in their back office, and... well everywhere.
This may cause them to change their policy for new software development, and it may also squeeze the java developer market badly, but for sure there will be strong arguements for splashing £50k here, £90k there, £20k somewhere else, on getting the new JVM to pick up the performance of application x, y, z which are long in the tooth and a pain in the arse.
The alternative is to rebuild, which carries risk - although would be a good move in the long run. In the meetings someone will say "yeah, but we are all dead in the long run" and that's that basically. As a CIO you just pay over £50k, get your users back on side, keep your job for another year, collect your bonus, put another years pension contrib into the pot.
So, Oracle will make money, lots of money, off this. You guys can squeak, MS will cheer, the Python community will see a boost (perhaps), but Larry and co will be richer.
Mysql (in the future) = Oracle feather light (down load it and run it and you are up and going in less than 1hr - oracle normal = 6hrs to setup?) But, if you are an enterprise DBA then you want the management and recovery features that Oracle gives you (as well as the scaling - even though it gets so mind bendingly expensive).
Open office - who cares?
Oracle bought Sun to be IBM mark 2. Expect them to buy Accenture next.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
You do realize that Google uses Java extensively ?
I agree - the fact Google uses/relies on Java is really an Achilles heel for them. I'm 100% certain that when Larry bought Sun he scratched a 10 year itch he's had for how "Sun ought to run their business" - by making two versions of java one "free" crippled, and another enterprise one. Get 'em hooked, then bend 'em over and make 'em take it up the ass and pay for the service - that is the Oracle business strategy isn't it? Ellison could care less if anybody new ever uses/deploys Java -- because the installed application base alone in fortune 500 companies (existing oracle customers) is easily enough to pay 10x for what Sun cost. It's a freaking mint, and I think he's doing the right thing (for his shareholders) - he's not interested in the long term business plan, only short term revenue.
Killing mysql (a competitor they were losing business to), killing open office was just icing on the cake, and monetizing Solaris were just a few of the ways he's planning to make money.
I imagine this conversation happening in the Oracle board room:
Ellison: "we gotta nip this free software thing in the bud boys, next thing you know our stupid customers will be expecting our stuff for free too." (look of disgust)
Henchmen #1: "yeah boss, but how we gonna pay for it? the shareholders will never buy it"
Ellison: "those morons at Sun have been doing it wrong for years boys, what have I always told you"
Henchmen #1: "the customer will always pay more?"
Henchmen #2: "who cares if it's crap, ship it anyway?"
Henchmen #1: "who cares if my jet wakes people up? i'm rich?"
Henchmen #2: "nothing is sweeter than making the customer pay up the ass for crap?"
Ellison: "no, well - yes, I've said all those things, but I'm talking about how I'd run Sun, how I'd make everybody pay for Java, nobody should expect to use it for free"
Henchmen #2: "oh yeah boss, that was a good one"
Ellison: "look at this boys, it's like it's a god damn christmas - we stop mysql for a few years while the community 'forks' or whatever, you realize how much revenue that is going to protect for us?"
Henchmen #2: "oh yeah boss, that's alotta money"
Ellison: "then we kill open office, teach anybody who bought it a lesson, nothing is free - you want to use it - you should pay for it"
Henchmen #2: "yeah boss, keep going"
Ellison: "you realize how many of our customers depend on Solaris - they can't replace it for at least a few years, in the meantime we can tear them a new asshole and let the money flow out"
Henchmen #2: "that makes sense"
Ellison: "and then there's Java, wow.. what a stupid bunch of dumbfucks Sun was, I'll replace their free love society with Larrys pleasure palace where you have to pay me for some action"
Henchmen #2: "you mean metaphorically right boss?"
Ellison: "hard to say, all i know is that in the next few years boys, we're definitely going to be busy screwing all Suns customers up the ass, and charging them for the pleasure of it"
Henchmen #1: "so you mean basically we're going to do business as usual here at Oracle Co.?"
Ellison: "exactly"
The key word in business is "momentum" - the Sun acquisition took momentum from so many projects, and anybody that was using those projects (for commercial purposes) now is in the unenviable position that they need to either starting pay Oracle, or try and find a viable competitor (at least 5 years). In the short term everybody will pay, do you realize how many billions of dollars we're talking about - in 5 years they'll wash rinse repeat. This is the cycle we should expect to see in the future - I think it will be very good for Oracle (bad for the community, but nobody really gives a damn what those free-loving hippies think anyway)
Remember Fortune 500 CIO's can't risk their enterprise to free "crippled" versions of software, they can't use unproven forks, if something goes wrong - it's their ass (and bye bye stock options), they'll choose free only when they absolutely have to. Nobody cares how much money "they save", it's a corporation, it's not about saving, it's about CYA.
Oh my god I hope the folks at Oracle never get ahold of ASF.
I have to admit - the folks at Oracle are brilliant (from a shareholder perspective) because they get how big businesses work.
Let's take JVM as an example: you have defined instruction set (bytecode), well defined ABI (this one is much better than in conventional operating systems) and well defined set of standard services (standard libraries). You also have class loader which somewhat resembles dynamic linker functionality in the conventional OS. Oh, and there is a pretty damn good debugging/profiling/monitoring infrastructure built in. And from application programmer point of view JVM is pretty much like a OS. Programmer can use many languages to target this platform, not just Java. It is possible to implement almost any language on top of JVM (albeit some things have no practical sense, for example C/C++ with its pointer arithmetics).
Would Larry prove its intent to totally screw Java (I'm still not sure of it yet), we'd need to have another platform rather than another language. There are enough cool languages to choose from, but aside from JVM and CLR there are no viable, widely supported multi-language, multi-paradigm platforms. JVM is propably the best one available but as it ages, there are more and more shortcomings visible. Having enough support from companies and developers (and from Larry screwing up Java) one can design and implement a new VM addressing some additional things, like:
- native support for dynamic dispatch (albeit OpenJDK7 seems to support it in some way) - what I mean by that is trying to achieve performance somewhat comparable to statically typed programs (now we mostly compare to C implemented couterparts, eg. JRuby vs. Ruby, Jython vs. cPython etc.);
- support for big memory heaps - most VMs suck at this (except for Azul), so we have to slice server machines and run many instances of JVM on one machine, then cluster/farm these JVM which is both silly and troublesome;
- better support for massive concurrency - again, most JVMs suck at this and Java thread model isn't perfect and isn't suitable for everything;
- support for multiple independent garbage collector zones - some language may utilize this to mitigate concurrency/big memory heap problems (Erlang, anyone?); ability to use different garbage collection algorithms in different zones if it makes sense (ex. big heap as in Java vs. small heaps as in Erlang);
- ability to execute on multiple target devices at once - to utilize GPUs/APUs directly from bytecode (maybe with some limitations), without those crappy hacks we see today; it also applies to memory management that seems to be a horrible hack in current GPGPU solutions;
- better support for long running VM processes, mainly hot code loading (Sun JVM sucks at this but some other solutions like JRockit seem to do a better job), maybe some code versioning, better tools to administer / tinker with running VM process (similiar to what Erlang has);
There is more than 15 years since Java was published. There is about 10 years since Microsoft built its CLR. And there is a lot of new things that appeared (GPUs, huge memories, multicores) and lots of new knowledge we obtained since then (look at all these JS interpreters in modern browsers!). There is also a pretty good base to build on (LLVM, V8, BEAM, PyPy and tons of other projects). On top of such VM we can implement various languages (including Java), maybe even better than JVM.
With enough help from friendly enough companies (RedHat? Google?) we can propably do much better than JVM and leave Larry and his corporate cronies in the dust. As long as there is a good quality reference implementation we don't need to chase Java APIs nor we do need to beg for TCK access.
You are confusing the theoretical cost of ideal garbage collection with the actual cost in a particular implementation.
I have worked on optimizing real-world Java applications that really were running too slowly. The problem really was that they were allocating too many short-lived objects in a modern JVM, and reducing the number of allocations really did improve performance significantly. Sorry if reality doesn't match your fashionable assumptions, but that's just the way it is.
Just look at some benchmarks some time. Scala performance is closer to Python than Java. Yes, often that's fast enough. No, it is not always possible to throw hardware at the problem when it isn't.
(*) In order it to be a "sharp" the symbol in use must be (1) in italics, and (2) in a musical clef. In Microsoft's language definition it is neither, that makes those two vertical and two horizontal lines a "pound" no matter how much they want you to call it a "sharp".
a) The pound symbol is that cursive L shaped glyph with the verital cross through it.
b) Only in the US is # called the 'pound sign'. Canada calls it the 'number sign', most of the rest of the english speaking world calls it the hash.
c) Technically you are correct that # isn't an actual sharp sign, but you are incorrect on both counts as to why. A sharp does not need to be on a "musical clef". And it has nothing to do with italics. The sharp must have true vertical bars, and slanted horizontal bars. A number sign must have true horizontal bars, with optionally slanted vertical bars.
d) The language C# is called C-sharp. Wandering around calling it c-pound and actually arguing that this is somehow correct is just pointless. Why "c-pound" and not "c-hash" or even "c-octothorpe"?
C-sharp is the clearly stated intention of the people who named it, and at the end of the day language rules are descriptive not prescriptive. The symbols use to write things do not dictate how we pronounce them. Written language is simply an approximation using a mix of tradition, convention, and convenience.
The programming language was named "c-sharp". It was then rendered conveniently as C#. Suck it up.