
Oracle Lays Off Java Mission Control Team After Open-Sourcing Product - rbanffy
https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/06/open-source-jmc
======
kodablah
I don't see a big issue with this. I don't like Oracle as much as the next
guy, but when the community votes to de-corporate project I think it is
reasonable to lay off the people performing corporate maintenance. Surely
those who voted to "community-ize" it (which I agree with) will re-hire these
people to continue their effort lest they think these things just magically
maintain themselves. Granted Oracle was one of those who voted. I think these
are just reasonable ebbs and flows of businesses and shuttering or devolving
yourself of products.

I think most of people's hate will come from hating Oracle or emotionally
hating the idea of layoffs. In this particular case it's a damned if you do
damned if you don't. One side wants Oracle to open everything and stop
exercising control over things (e.g. their own branded JDK which was only
differentiated by support and these kinds of tools). Another side lambastes
Oracle for not keeping the people around to do the work. We all want less
Oracle control over the JVM yet we all secretly want them to keep working on
it and paying the people to do so.

~~~
tzs
I think that what irks a lot of people is that Oracle has almost 300 open
positions in the US for Java developers.

Why lay off experienced developers instead of moving them to currently
unfilled positions?

~~~
tudelo
I wonder if they are actually filling those roles?

~~~
Twirrim
Can't speak for other parts of the org, but Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
is growing fast. Most teams have a target to double+ staffing within 6 months,
and from what I've seen, they're roughly succeeding with their goals.

I don't know that Oracle specifically works to transfer staff around (not been
in a situation to know). The job boards _are_ open and available internally,
and some of the OCI growth is happening via internal transfers. People from
across the company are specifically reaching out to hiring managers.

~~~
makr17
Anyone else remember far enough back to when OCI referred to the Oracle Call
Interface (C library)?

~~~
Twirrim
There's little traces of "OCI" with different meaning all over the place in
Oracle, so far as I've seen. Guess it's just one of those useful TLAs that
keep repeating.

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Someone1234
Is Oracle legitimately trying to kill the Java ecosystem or is it just a happy
accident? They're almost going out of their way to unravel almost everything
Sun stood for and what Java was meant to be...

The sad irony is that if this continues, and C# Core keeps getting better,
people might move not because C# is inherently better but just to escape
Oracle's influence.

Java is a lot less "free" than many like to claim see:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_users_non_compliance/)

You might say: "Well just don't use that stuff then!" sure, fine, but what if
a vendor you use used them? You still owe Oracle money.

Microsoft might be bad, but Oracle is worse, and Java is Oracle.

~~~
rad_gruchalski
> Is Oracle legitimately trying to kill the Java ecosystem or is it just a
> happy accident? They're almost going out of their way to unravel almost
> everything Sun stood for and what Java was meant to be...

How does one come to such conclusion after corporate open sources a project?

~~~
Someone1234
By looking at Oracle's management of Java in the larger scope. Here they're
destroying a popular Java product used to support other Java products to save
money.

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filereaper
Perhaps this is a good opportunity to highlight the OpenJ9 team (i.e there is
another). IBM is investing in them and the project has been open-sourced under
the Eclipse Foundation.

More use of OpenJ9 incentivizes more features, support and more devs being
hired.

[https://adoptopenjdk.net/?variant=openjdk8-openj9](https://adoptopenjdk.net/?variant=openjdk8-openj9)

~~~
nobleach
Why do I see this: `There are no releases available for openjdk9-openj9`? I'd
love to play with it, but I would rather use JDK 9.

~~~
shishko
JDK 9 and JDK 10 are in nighty builds

[https://adoptopenjdk.net/nightly.html?variant=openjdk9-openj...](https://adoptopenjdk.net/nightly.html?variant=openjdk9-openj9)

------
stealthmodeclan
I think Microsoft is about to take off.

Businesses are going to move to Azure and use dotnet core. Today we've visual
studio on mac too. Plus, visual studio code on Linux.

Who wants to deal with Java BS when their master pisses of people with these
idiotic moves.

Not to mention Rider IDE.

~~~
wil421
From what I’ve been told C# is really great to work with and fixes a lot of
issues people had with Java.

Can anyone who’s used both recently comment?

~~~
bunderbunder
I am a relatively recent transplant from C# to Java. I'm still getting my
bearings, but my general sense is that Java has an amazing ecosystem in the
large scale, and that makes it much easier to tackle the hard problems, but is
the absolute pits to work with for everyday challenges. IOW, Java makes the
hard problems easier and the easy problems harder.

Concrete example: .NET has nothing comparable to the Hadoop ecosystem, or to
International Components for Unicode.

Concrete example: Compared to what's in .NET, a lot of stuff in the core Java
libraries feels very half-baked. Streams, for example is missing a lot of
useful features that I am used to seeing in every comparable library. There's
not even a mapi in there. Bifurcating it from iterables and the rest of the
collections API also creates some ergonomic annoyances that don't exist in,
e.g., .NET or Scala's equivalents.

~~~
Retric
From what I recall .NET has built in almost all of International Components
for Unicode features. You can still use ICU from C# if you want to, but I have
never personally seen anyone do so.

See: GenICUWrapper A tool that generates a rudimentary C# wrapper around the C
API of ICU4C. ICU Dotnet - .NET bindings for ICU [http://site.icu-
project.org/related](http://site.icu-project.org/related) or
[https://github.com/sillsdev/icu-dotnet](https://github.com/sillsdev/icu-
dotnet)

There are also .Net options for Hadoop so I am not sure what you mean exactly?

~~~
bunderbunder
There are options, there are always options, but they are typically 2nd class,
incomplete, poorly supported, or otherwise substandard.

For example, first line of the readme for icu-dotnet (emphasis mine):

> icu-dotnet is the C# wrapper for _a subset of_ ICU4C

~~~
Retric
ICU4C has quite a bit of cruft at this point, so the useful subset is
perfectly reasonable. You can always add anything to these layers you want,
but it's really not worth the effort.

------
kbenson
It seems like Oracle has struck on a way to not just get the community to help
with their maintenance and development, but a way to trick the community into
doing all their work for them.

If I had to guess, I would bet that the license requires contributors to give
up rights to their work so Oracle can still use it in proprietary products
with little or no stipulations.

~~~
gaius
There is a word for any engineer that subsequently contributes code to this
project. We need some solidarity in this industry.

------
krylon
A real class act all the way. /s

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JdeBP
> _Hirt confirmed that of the JMC team, only three were left at Oracle,
> including himself._

... and then quotes Hirt's statement that, quite clearly, _does not_ say that
_only_ three people were left, but merely names three people out of an
unstated number possibly larger than three that were left.

------
cryptos
Every time I read something about Oracle, I think this shop should be
rebranded as Asshole Inc.

~~~
pjmlp
Yep, but neither Google after torpedoing Sun, nor IBM or any other Java
relevant company cared to save Java assets from Sun.

So here we are.

~~~
geodel
IBM supported Apache Harmony which Oracle forced to shutdown. Google used
harmony and they are still in legal quagmire.

~~~
pjmlp
If Google had given a penny to Sun for each Android device, Sun would still be
around.

~~~
0x7f800000
If companies had to give a penny to Sun for every device which used Java,
nothing would be written in Java.

~~~
pjmlp
Google is the only company that refused to do it, trying to find a workaround
around Java licensing.

So yeah, companies were paying much more than pennies to Sun, until Google
came around and offered them a (free beer) Java fork, thus torpedoing Sun
profits regarding Java.

