The Coming War Over the Future of Java

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes about what could be the end of the Java Community Process as we know it. With the Apache Software Foundation declaring war on Oracle over Java, the next likely step would be a vote of no confidence in the JCP, which, if the ASF can convince enough members to follow suit, 'could effectively unravel the Java community as a whole,' McAllister writes, with educators, academics, and researchers having little incentive to remain loyal to an Oracle-controlled platform. 'Independent developers could face the toughest decisions of all. Even if the JCP dissolves, many developers will be left with few alternatives,' with .Net offering little advantage, and Perl, Python, and Ruby unable to match Java's performance. The dark horse? Google Go — a language Google might just fast-track in light of its patent suit with Oracle over Android." Reader Revorm adds related news that Oracle and Apple have announced the OpenJDK project for OS X.

Comments

Re:Alternatives?

[bonch]

I'd love to see something utilizing LLVM. I'm not convinced the OSS community has the organizational capability. I'm also not sure GPL people would work on something BSD-licensed. Instead, they'd try to reinvent the wheel, it would go nowhere for years, and nothing would come of it.

Umm, .NET?

[not already in use]

with .Net offering little advantage

.NET is technically superior to Java in almost every way. But, this is the vacuum known as slashdot, where an extremely viable solution will be cast off as "offering little advantage" simply because it is associated with Microsoft. It's cool. You can go on writing mountains of boiler plate code in your horribly stagnant neo-cobol.