Not even a year after Oracle's acquisition of
Sun was completed, they start doing what everyone expected: Pushing
prices an killing off free
products. Now they're ready for the next big step: Earn big money from
Java. In a first step, there will be a "premium"
JVM besides the free one.
Let's guess what comes
next. Many people say Oracle is destroying Java. They're both right and
wrong. Right because moves like this kill the spirit of the community. Right
now, there's a Java open source library for nearly every problem that can be
solved using computers. Many of those libraries are written by individuals
for fun or fame, not for profit. I believe those people will soon turn their
back on Java and move on to languages where "the other cool guys" already are
(ruby, python, javascript or whatever will be the next big thing).
But that does not mean Java will die. Even today, Java is seen by many
programmers as a boring, verbose enterprise language. Big companies move slow
and only when they have to. They don't have. Even if at some distant point in
the future, Oracle will stop supporting OpenJDK, someone will make a large
Excel sheet and find that paying a few thousand bucks to Oracle every month
is cheaper than even thinking about alternatives. There will always be enough
Java programmers, at least as long as Schools and Universities teach it as
the first language. And why should they stop doing so when the corporate
world has great demand for Java programmers?
In the long
run, Java will become exactly what the haters are calling it: Boring
corporate stuff. Of course that was inevitable, but Oracle sure does the best
it can to accelerate this development.