I seriously don’t understand Oracle. The bought up Sun Microsystems a while ago and have been working hard on ruining all obtained products as quickly as possible. Although Sun was never good at monetizing what they produced they made some great stuff and were usually pretty open with it. Java, OpenOffice, and Solaris were all open source products by the time they ended up being bought by Oracle.
The main benefit of Java has always been the ability to “write once, run everywhere.” Java doesn’t always deliver on that promise by nine times out of ten it does. I know a lot of people still give Java flak for being slow, bloated, and a device to butcher babies but frankly anybody who’s worked with it on a serious project generally walks away feeling that Java is a viable tool to get jobs done. I rather enjoy the fact that I can write a piece of software, compile it once, and then run it on my Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Apparently Oracle doesn’t understand this advantage and are now looking to monetize Java. I have no problem with monetizing a product, I’m a free market advocate after all. The problem I have is how Oracle is planning on going about monetizing Java. Their talking about releasing to version of the Java Development Kit (JDK), a free one and a premium one. By the sounds of it the premium version of the JDK will contain performance improvements in addition to some additional libraries (mostly for interacting with Oracle’s other products).
For a product like Java divergence is a bad thing. Once you remove the guarantee that an application you wrote will run on any platform with a Java Virtual Machine you’ve also removed the only real advantage. If there are two versions of the virtual machine the most likely outcome is people will only write software to target the free version as that’s the only version you can guarantee people will be willing to obtain. Java has always had a reputation for poor performance (a reputation that should be abolished at this point) so having performance only in the paid version is going to hurt the product’s reputation even more.
Frankly I just don’t understand Oracle’s strategy. They seemed to have purchased Sun just to ruin their products as fast as possible. Thankfully this purchase happened after groups already implemented clean room developments of the Java Virtual Machine and Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) which gives us an alternative to whatever Oracle comes out with.
When the merger was first announced, a lot of people I know were screaming about how Oracle was just buying Sun to kill MySQL. I thought those people were nuts.
The way Oracle has been systematically crippling Sun projects, even when those projects _don’t_ compete with an Oracle product in the market, led me to believe that, even if my friends weren’t necessarily _right_, they weren’t _nuts_.
The way they’re treating Java, to which their own flagship product has been wedded at the hip for years even before the merger, might lead me to think that my friends were right.