
Forks for everyone!
I'm sure glad Oracle is steering. It would really suck if a drunken rapist drove the bus into a fiery pit of death.
IBM and Oracle have divvied up the leadership of OpenJDK – the leading open-source Java project – finally giving IBM the sort of Java control it spent ten years fighting Sun Microsystems for. The new bylaws for the OpenJDK community outline a governing board that consists of a chairman, vice chairman, OpenJDK lead, and two …
... but keep your enemies closer. The EU would never have the brains to allow IBM to buy SAP, and they all know it. Mostly people buy IBM software to cut their Oracle software costs. Without a SAP in their pocket, that is a game of customer lock-in that IBM cannot possibly win in the long run.
See for yourself:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/java.php
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=gnat
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=ats
ATS could quite well replace Java, as it is also a safe programming language.
Hurgh, I've just read up on ATS.
It really, really, really won't be replacing java, and to think otherwise suggests that you've spent a little too much time locked away in an ivory tower somewhere.
Hint: Java's speed, or lack thereof, is not its primary failing.
. . . the "Java belongs to Sun^WOracle and what we say goes" version of "open" Java.
I suppose it isn't quite right or reasonable to compare it to the Vichy government of France, but I'm not sure what else to suggest... maybe the UK "Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs" whose independence from the government that they supposedly advise was famously ripped up with the sacking of the highly respected Professor David Nutt. Don't feel too bad for him, he wasn't getting paid for it anyway, and it was almost the greatest compliment they could pay him - other than an actual compliment, I suppose.
Anyway, I suppose we can expect Java and cannabis users now to be treated equally, i.e. viciously beaten when our pusher puts up the price and we can't pay. Perhaps there is something wrong with the metaphor, there, but then my employer runs a database using a Java desktop application communicating with Microsoft SQL Server, and there was something wrong with building a business on Java working with a Microsoft database product when Java was owned by Sun. Now that Java is owned by a major competing database product, it's even more wrong, isn't it?
At my company we use java heavily, and we're a bit worried about Oracle taking back so much control that Sun had relinquished. Are we looking at standard Oracle practice, increasing (or introducing in this case) licensing fees? What java is safe to standardize on moving forward? Should we stick with Oracle java, or start moving to openJDK? Our containers are tomcat or jboss (where EJB's are needed)