Why Oracle Should Cede Control of Java SE (infoworld.com)

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: Now that Oracle wants to turn over leadership of enterprise Java's (Java EE's) development to a still-unnamed open source foundation, might the same thing happen with the standard edition of Java (Java SE) that Oracle also controls? Such a move could produce substantial benefits... Oracle said it has no plans to make such a move. But the potential fruits of a such a move are undeniable.

For one, a loosening of Oracle's control could entice other contributors to Java to participate more... [W]ith the current Oracle-dominated setup, other companies and individuals could be reluctant to contribute a lot if they see it as benefiting a major software industry provider -- and possible rival -- like Oracle... Indeed, the 22-year-old language and platform could be given a whole new lease on life, if the open source community rises to the occasion and boosts participation...

Despite the potential to grow Java SE by ceding control, Oracle seems content to hold on to its place as the steward of JDK development. But that could change given the tempestuous relationship Oracle has with parts of the Java community. Oracle has been at loggerheads with the community over both Java SE and Java EE... Oracle may at some point decide it is easier to just cede control rather than having to keep soothing the ruffled feathers that keep occurring among its Java partners.

Comments

Will NEVER happen

[GodfatherofSoul]

I think they acquired Sun (and Java as a result) as a dick move towards Google. If they had any inclination to do so, way back then would have been the opportune time. Doing so now would be seen as admitting defeat (as if the court loss wasn't a big enough statement).

Re:Will NEVER happen

[Pseudonym]

I think they acquired Sun (and Java as a result) as a dick move towards Google.

I think they acquired Sun because Oracle was the only thing that people used SPARC and Solaris for at the time.

Re:Will NEVER happen

[gtall]

I'd second that. The conversation with Java probably went along the lines of:

Oracle Lawyer: So this Java, what's it do?

Sun Lawyer: It's great, you can write code once and run it on anything.

OL: Why would I want to do that?

SL: Because then all the software will be essentially controlled by you.

OL: Oh....does it have any profit potential?

SL: (looks at other Sun Lawyer and gives sneaky wink) Big Pontential, oh yes!!

Re: Good reasons to keep control of Java SE

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's the #1 language on TIOBE index by a large margain, but it's dead. Sure. Ok.

Is there something about the millennial generation to just convince themselves what they like to be true? I mean, I think Justin Beiber is the worst, but I don't pretend that everyone hates him and his career is over.

Come back to reality kid. Java is used now more than ever, and will continue to be used for a very long time.

Re: Good reasons to keep control of Java SE

[Anonymous Coward]

That means nothing. I've been to plenty of businesses where they have policies in place now they actively prevent Java apps being used. It's a dying language. Part of the problem is that they are still teaching it in universities and that probably contributes to their perceived popularity.

Re:Good reasons to keep control of Java SE

[Anonymous Coward]

^^ Fact free politics-style rant, asking readers to agree on the basis of the writer's "passion" and reference to "dealing with it for 20 years".

Will that be enough here? *shrugs*

inb4 Microsoft

[NicknameUnavailable]

decides to include the new open-source Java as a part of it's .NET platform just to piss in Oracle's face.

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[sproketboy]

They can't cause they are too shit for that. Java > .NET in every conceivable way. If you don't understand that then go home.

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Java > .NET in every conceivable way.

Oh really? Take a look at the feature by feature comparison of C# and Java. C# supports both more and better features than Java and the .NET class library is richer in both breadth and depth. And where is Oracle in the cloud these days? The two biggest players right now are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Google and Apple are both working on their cloud offerings, but they're still behind AWS and Azure. Oracle isn't even in the race. Oracle views the cloud as "pay us to run our software products for you on our servers", not as a development platform for independent software that might even compete with their cash cow business applications and database business. In many ways Oracle is where Microsoft used to be during the Steve Ballmer administration a decade ago, before Satya Nadella took over. Under Nadella's leadership Microsoft has seized upon opportunities to open source the .NET platform, build serious cross platform development tools and make them available free of charge while promoting the Azure cloud platform for independent development, even if it competes with them. Moreover, Microsoft is doing these things even though they arguably hurt the Windows and Office business in the short run because Nadella understands that Microsoft's future depends upon open source development and the cloud business, not the platforms of the past. Compare that with Larry Ellison of Oracle, who's still effectively in charge and is a contemporary of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. He was late to the cloud and his leadership of Oracle in recent years suggests an antiquated and unreformed view of the software industry that's stuck in the past while his competitors take a more modern view. Java has languished under Oracle and was made radioactive after the Google lawsuit. Ellison demonstrated that he was perfectly willing to burn any good will that Java still had in the open source community, making them pawns in his grand strategy legal attack against Google and Android. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they never sued anybody for making compatible or interoperable implementations of .NET languages or class libraries. Why continue as Larry Ellison's bitch when there are so many better alternatives to Java? It's a good question.

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[DarkOx]

Say what you want about Microsoft, but they never sued anybody for making compatible or interoperable implementations of .NET languages or class libraries

I think that has more to do with Mono never becoming much more than a toy for most and possibly useful to a very narrow set of special cases by a handful of enterprises who were unlikely to pick a Microsoft technology if they had to pony up.

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[NicknameUnavailable]

Oracle views the cloud as "pay us to run our software products for you on our servers"

I think you give them too much credit to assume they view it as anything. Every single group I've ever come across using Oracle software was an NPO or a government agency who knew some really shady contractors. They get in the door to large corporations through handshake deals then corrupt every non-Oracle thing they touch into being incompatible with everything else, they're basically Microsoft for hipsters.

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[sproketboy]

The most critical rule to any hiring process: of the applicant likes .NET not only reject them, but spread the word. People with .NET "experience" are all hacks, formally educated wannabe software developers without an ounce of actual experience - save sometimes for Microsoft Paint, if you can even call it that.

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[NicknameUnavailable]

The difference being .NET is useful for quickly prototyping things and for making super powerful stuff with minimal effort, while Java doesn't even have a supporting library with 5% the capacity of the .NET core. But hey, if you knew any of that you wouldn't be a Java supporter.

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[sproketboy]

Where did you get that from you're anus? Compare JavaFX to WPF one weekend. I dare you.

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[NicknameUnavailable]

WPF is a very minor part of the .NET library.

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[sproketboy]

Sorry, was that an argument?

Re:inb4 Microsoft

[NicknameUnavailable]

Considering you basically said "a notepad is better than Excel because you can draw on it," yes that was an argument. You compared a very minor portion of the .NET framework only even relevant to UI designers to the power of a library - actually that example I gave is a bad one, because UI isn't even programming.

Because they're getting their asses handed to them

[rsilvergun]

by Node.js and Angular for anything besides the odd query to a database here and there?

Paul Krill = Joke

[sproketboy]

Paul Krill is a joke. Just look at his history.

Give it away?

[boudie2]

Larry Ellison didn't get to where he is (one of the richest in the world) by giving shit away. Is there a tax deduction involved? Hidden agenda?

Re:What about following the Rust model?

[ShanghaiBill]

the Rust Moderation Team, which enforces the Rust Code of Conduct. This code of conduct ensures a tolerant environment for all. Anyone who doesn't show tolerance is excluded.

We should use Rust to bring peace to the Middle East.

Re:What about following the Rust model?

[Anonymous Coward]

You joke, but this is what the Rust Code of Conduct says (with emphasis added):

We will exclude you from interaction if you insult, demean or harass anyone. That is not welcome behaviour. We interpret the term “harassment” as including the definition in the Citizen Code of Conduct; if you have any lack of clarity about what might be included in that concept, please read their definition. In particular, we don’t tolerate behavior that excludes people in socially marginalized groups.

The same paragraph that states "we don’t tolerate behavior that excludes people" starts with "We will exclude you from interaction".

potential fruits?

[Gravis Zero]

But the potential fruits of a such a move are undeniable.

How are these "potential fruits" going to help Oracle? I ask because that's the only thing Oracle actually cares about.

Oracle has no interest in doing "the right thing"

[gavron]

Public corporations tend to do things to benefit themselves. Oracle fought to get APIs covered by copyright -- and won. That's a step backward in the US software world in an amazing amount. Yes, the court didn't make Google pay because fair-use, but fair-user is judged on a case-by-case basis _at trial_. So going forward, because of Oracle's greed and unbending desire to control all of Java everything (and Android) all software developers in the US have this API pitfall to watch out for.

Second, even if there is no direct benefit, there's no indirect benefit to Oracle to open-source Java (or anything). So long as they can extract complex licensing and other fees from everyone wanting to use Java (EE) or the JDK or the API... that's exactly how they work.

Oracle wants to dominate The Market, All Markets, and Larry Ellison has an ego to rival anyone. Unfortunately people with large egos are unable to make decisions that benefit anyone other than themselves.

E

Plenty of facts

[HBI]

Java is disappearing from military and corporate requirements.
US Army mandate to write all new code in Java ended a few years ago.

It's going away. Really. It's time to learn a new language, for those who can. Unless you like being in dead-end support jobs for the next 20-30 years. Ask your COBOL forebears how much they liked that.

Re:Plenty of facts

[mean pun]

Really. It's time to learn a new language, for those who can.

Such as? Yes, there are a few potential successors, such as Rust or Scala, but none of them is a breakthrough language.

Re: Plenty of facts

[Miamicanes]

The main problem with Scala is that it enables experienced Scala developers to write idiomatic code that's utterly indecipherable by anyone besides other, comparably-sophisticated Scala developers who've internalized that same idiom.

With Java, a less-experienced Java developer can still generally make sense of code that's above his skill level and eventually figure out how it works. With Scala, a less-experienced developer is just plain dead in the water because Scala allows *so much* to be implicitly defined by context & convention.

IntelliJ's Scala team is painfully aware of this. For years, they've been trying to mitigate Scala's problem at the IDE level by having the IDE sniff out code idioms defined by convention & context and display them semi-inline with the code itself. It helps, but in many cases it's more like fragile training wheels subject to breaking off at any time. And it makes Scala even more IDE-bound than Java... with Java, a good IDE is necessary for keeping sane & grunt-work automation... with Scala, it's an almost-essential part of deciphering code written by someone else *at all.* It's very hard to join a team of experienced Scala devs as an experienced Java developer and work efficiently alongside them... the Java-to-Scala learning curve is nowhere close to being as straightforward as most people initially think.

In short, Scala attempts to resolve Java's endless boilerplate code that needs an IDE for humans to manage efficiently with dense, idiomatic code that needs an IDE (doing de-facto realtime-decompilation & reverse-engineering) to be understood by humans.

With a good IDE, both meet somewhere near the middle of the "source readability" spectrum. My point is that Scala trades one major shortcoming (excessive boilerplate) for one that's approximately equal in magnitude, but opposite in details.

In theory, a good Scala developer can find a "happy middle path" that straightens up Java's boilerplate mess without becoming unreadable... but in the real world, Scala tends to just invert the old problem into an equally-bad new one.

Re:Plenty of facts

[david_thornley]

If you haven't learned a new language, do so. Learn several new languages with different concepts while you're at it (not simultaneously), so you're reasonably familiar with the ideas behind the next big thing, whatever that is.

Not a moron to face facts

[HBI]

If you want to do new, cool stuff, you're not doing it in Java.

Re: Not a moron to face facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix's backend is Java, among others. Java 8 / Spring Boot / Hibernate / Hysterix / Eureka is an extremely capable setup.

Java EE and JSP is old and shitty, but it doesn't mean all of Java is.

Re: Not a moron to face facts

[orlanz]

Oh god! It would be so nice if people would do less cool new stuff! These days it feels like people barely know how to code. The end result is a "good enough" product that no one maintains. If there is a customer complaint, they patch it.

That's it. People work on "cool new stuff" and patches. No one seems to work on the stuff that people are actually using and is actually important.

Re:What about following the Rust model?

[The Evil Atheist]

You're the smartass kid in class who takes everything literally as though its funny and clever and reads only enough of a sentence to feel like you're so smart to find a contradiction. But that contradiction falls apart when actually comprehending the whole sentence, had you cared to read it whole.

Re:OOP is dead! Hail functional programming!

[MightyMartian]

Not might be; is fully and completely retarded. Nosql has replaced SQL, seriously? That's the same level of stupidity that has people here declaring Java dead.

Re: Good reasons to keep control of Java SE

[mark-t]

I would think that the sheer number of job available that need it is what is contributing to it's "perceived popularity".

But of course, the number of jobs in which one would use a programming language is certainly a piss-poor indicator of any true merit it might have, right?

(eye-roll)

Leave it for dead

[Billly Gates]

Let it go. Java had it's day in the sun during the .com era (no pun intended). It failed after Sun struck out bigtime on what could have been and the biggest thing in quite some time. .NET is taking over large scale stuff, and newer node.js, angular, and even Python for the small to medium projects. Java is outdated and Sun and then Oracle left it out to rot by not making native compilers and obsessing over making it work with Solaris and forcing developers not to do win32 only. Meanwhile Python for some reason doesn't have this problem.

It is legacy and a security risk and will never have a native look and feel and compiler. c# is what Java could have been and keeps getting innovations like Linq and generics (I might be outdated as I haven't touched Java in 10 years on generics). Let it die we have other newer things now.

Re:Leave it for dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Native look and feel? Java's place is on the server. It's fucking huge there and going nowhere. This is where real software runs and where 'newer' things are not valued unless they're so much better than what they're replacing that it's worth the effort, which it hardly ever is. Java replaced COBOL here. Nothing else is even on the horizon right now.

Re: Leave it for dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Ssshhh, let them think it's dead. That way I can keep my prices up. They probably don't release the android apps they use everyday or the services they access are written in Java.

Re:Leave it for dead

[angel'o'sphere]

There is no alternative to Java.
Native compilation is completely irrelevant as VMs have jit compilers.
It wil probabaly be a decade or more than C++ has the tools and libraries Java has, based on LLVM.

As most Java code is enterprise Java running oa backend, native lok and feel is irrlevant.
It is overrated anyway, which you would know if you looked at a typical windows PC. Java running on it mostly looks native, and better than a legacy native app from one or two windows versions before. The ugliest applications on Windows are not Java or other non native applications but native applications where the orogrammers did not care about standards or used their own widget sets.

Re:Leave it for dead

[Pseudonym]

It wil probabaly be a decade or more than C++ has the tools and libraries Java has, based on LLVM.

Nobody seriously thinks that Java and C++ are competitors.

Re:Leave it for dead

[tomhath]

Other than the part about .Net I agree with what you said. But Java has a lot of momentum with companies like Oracle and IBM behind it, so it'll be around for a while as it becomes less and less relevant.

Re:Leave it for dead

[Billly Gates]

Other than the part about .Net I agree with what you said. But Java has a lot of momentum with companies like Oracle and IBM behind it, so it'll be around for a while as it becomes less and less relevant.

Yeah for legacy. No new projects use it. COBOL is still big too and will never die. But my point is lets make it legacy as both COBOL and Java did not keep up and earned their spots

Re:Leave it for dead

[MightyMartian]

I have no idea what you mean by "no new projects". Java is massive in the enterprise world, and I've seen no indication that it is merely in maintenance mode. Being a decent Java programmer will keep you employed for many years to come. I realize it's very faddish to declare Java dead, or at least rotting, but it is an absurd claim not backed up by any actual evidence at all.

Re:Leave it for dead

[MightyMartian]

You're kidding right? .NET is a Windows ecosystem that marginally runs on Linux of late. There's a massive ecosystem of enterprise Java systems out there that Microsoft could only wish it would touch. And that's not counting Android.

You're living in a fantasy if you think C# is actually competing with Java where Java is dominant.

Re:Leave it for dead

[tomhath]

New projects continue use it if they're outsourced to big contractors like the ones I already mentioned (IBM, Accenture, Oracle, etc.) because they have legions of programmers who don't know anything else and massive investments in server side tools they charge absurd license fees on.

Re:Leave it for dead

[angel'o'sphere]

As soon as we have byte code morphing, augmentation, aspect oriented programming on LLVM based environments, they will be again.
And I happy jump back to C++ when it has that, e.g. reflection, serialization etc.

Re:Leave it for dead

[Pseudonym]

Maybe in niche environments. For most software for which C++ is the language of choice, Java isn't a realistic option.

This is a strict subset of all software, of course. My point is that Java and C++ don't play in the same spaces for the most part. Desktop apps are probably the only area of significant overlap.

Re:Leave it for dead

[angel'o'sphere]

Right now as the world is going, that is right.
But there is nothing fundamentally wrong with using Java in *some* embedded environments, as car entertainment/radio, or use C++ in internet backends.
C++ basically only lacks frameworks and because Java already has them, no one has the intention to build some.

Re:Leave it for dead

[david_thornley]

C++ is like a straightedge razor, while Java is like scissors with rounded ends. C++ requires experienced people and Java really doesn't.

Re:Leave it for dead

[angel'o'sphere]

Both require experienced people.
In Java simple things are simpler than in C++, however as soon as you make software for a living there is lots of stuff to learn and know on the Java side as well, e.g. annotation based frameworks, dependency injection, aspect oriented programming etc. p.p.
I don't think that C++ is particular more complicated with modern language features (STL/boost etc.)

Re:Because they're getting their asses handed to t

[sg_oneill]

by Node.js and Angular for anything besides the odd query to a database here and there?

Awwwwwww, the graphic designer has a technical opinion. Keep up the good work! Have an encouragement ribbon.

Re: Good reasons to keep control of Java SE

[david_thornley]

COBOL is probably dying, but certainly more slowly than COBOL programmers. The shortage of COBOL programmers will hurt.

There are F/OS COBOL versions (that are not welcome in my house), but the ecosystem that hosts most of it is laden with old IBM mainframe systems that are not F/OS. I'd think that can only hurt the availability of replacement COBOL people.

Re:Oracle has no interest in doing "the right thin

[david_thornley]

APIs are creative products in a lasting form, and hence are copyrightable by pretty much all copyright law.

Not even Larry Ellison argued that there are any restrictions to using a published API to write software that interfaces with the API. The Java APIs can be used to write implementations of the APIs or to be called by other software. At least US copyright law is very clear on this: copyright can't be used to stop people from doing something. Everyone in the case where Oracle sued Google agrees on that, and the appeal court noted that specifically.

Oracle's claim was that Google used the APIs not for interoperability of software (perfectly legal) but to present developers with a familiar API rather than making them learn a new one. By their argument, nobody would be writing Dalvik libraries that would be useful for regular Java programming, and nobody would be writing Android apps that called regular Java libraries, and that the only reason Google used them was because they were familiar.