
And of course, they could then attempt to sue you for using their copyrighted APIs like certain other companies using Java.
Experimental and unfinished Java APIs could soon appear in new versions of Java under a plan from Oracle. So-called Incubator Modules have been proposed as a means of inserting promising features into the OpenJDK. OpenJDK is an open-source implementation and reference implementation of Java Standard Edition. Modules would …
Yes, it is amazing that they didn't think about what they would do to Java with their Google lawsuit. Java was kind of losing steam before they pulled the patent troll lawsuits and now no commercial business is going to want to write in Java for fear of some lawsuit. They can't be sort of open source.
Oracle believes the opt-in nature would avoid users becoming dependent on modules with warnings also issued of or when they are removed.
Here, Oracle seems to define a user as a developer making a Java application.
How does that help the real "users" of the application itself. Remember when you had to have multiple versions of Java installed on your machine because they were not compatible. How ridiculous was it to have to keep Java 1.6 when the world moved to 1.7 and 1.8? Oh wait, we STILL have that problem. And I don't see how this proposal would do anything other than make that even more complicated as it is.
Even if you don't distribute your Java app but only use it internally, does that really make it better? You have to keep your own systems on an old Java until you can afford to re-write your application to not reference now removed APIs? Seems more likely no one is ever going to use these APIs, and therefore there's no reason to include them in the first place.