

Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs - alt_
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/06/oracle_dueling_jvms/

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badmash69
To programmers, Sun seemed earnest about its intentions. Thats why we adopted
its Platform. Could anyone name one guy like James Gosling in Oracle ? Didn't
thinks so.

With Oracle, everything they do with Java seems to be slimy. Suing Google, JCP
elections ( Hologic ?? ). premium for JVM . I fear this trend is to continue.

There are those who think that Oracle would continue to invest in Open JDK and
continue to evolve it. I am sure they also believe that MySQl has an even
brighter future ahead of it.

The unfortunate sideffect is that cool new languages like Scala and Clojure
could end up as collateral damage as JVM is no longer seen as a viable and
open platform.

I just might have to bite the bullet and learn me some Haskell after all !! Or
GO programming language.

~~~
narrator
I think the best option for the community is to stick to JDK 1.6 and never
upgrade. If people get sick of the Java language going nowhere they can just
use Scala on JDK 1.6, or some sort of fork of the Java language that compiles
to bytecode that runs on 1.6, etc. I really can't see any of the open source
projects embracing the commercial feature set.

1.6 is a really great platform. I don't see it being obsoleted, at least on
the server side, for at least 5 more years and no doubt code will live on in
production that runs on 1.6 practically forever.

~~~
melling
This is really bad idea. Java and the JVM can still be greatly improved.
Closures, fixing generics, tail call optimization, module system, faster
startup, etc.

JavaFX will be a nice improvement once it's integrated with Java.

~~~
sukuriant
Hitting a couple of your points: What about Generics is broken? For the extent
of power they seem to intend to provide (forcing methods to only take a
particular type, and providing syntactic sugar so you don't have to cast
everywhere.

Tail-call optimization is just that, an optimization. A 1.6 compliant, open-
source JVM could provide that. Same with the faster startup time.

As I don't generally use closures, and would replicate their abilities through
interfaces and anonymous classes, I don't have a comment on them; and you'd
need to expound upon "module system" for me to say anything.

~~~
crux_
What's wrong with java generics: erasure. "Cast everywhere" is still
happening. And useful info is hidden: eg there is no access to generic type
info via reflection. Another wrong thing: generics are incompatible with
subtyping. (No co/contra-variance, to use the pointy headed terms)

Tail call optimization is not a mere optimization. A jvm cannot provide it and
still provide conforming exception stack traces, for example.

As far as closures: you're missing out :)

~~~
dantheman
Also tail call optimization changes the semantics of the language - it allows
you to write code that would normally be incorrect

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crux_
True, although you have to be careful about "incorrect": the code will still
compile (unless there's some corner case I'm missing?), so for that particular
definition of correctness it is just fine without TCO.

It just won't run (for very long). :)

~~~
dantheman
I agree, but compilation is a low barrier for correctness :)

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lukev
I have no problem with them releasing a commercial JVM with extra bells and
whistles and middleware - most people don't need that anyway, and the few who
do are more than willing to pay.

But they had _better_ not nerf OpenJDK relative to what it can do now.

~~~
skymt
Fortunately they can't do that. It's GPL'd, no take-backs. They could
conceivably remove things from future releases, but I'd expect to see a
community fork in that case.

~~~
pquerna
There is no patent license in the GPLv2.

Their decision to keep it on GPL v2 is very very explicit.

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DjDarkman
I really wonder 5 years from now what will be the impact of all this. It seems
that Oracle's strategy is to squeeze out every bit of penny from the assets
acquired from Sun, which is fine I guess, but I think they are taking it too
far.

I am starting not to trust Java,MySQL and all other products, they really give
me the impression that these will all be commercial-only.

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tommi
I wonder if Apple's decision to deprecate Java on Mac was based on these
plans.

~~~
lwhi
How would Apple have known about them?

~~~
eitland
Hint: The company that aquired Sun is Oracle. They have a proven track record
for monetizing stuff.

~~~
lwhi
I don't think Apple would have made this decision based upon a simple
assumption.

In any case, there's still a free JVM available.

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dreur
Just after announcing that IBM will be working with them on OpenJDK

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runT1ME
I think people are reading too much into this. Redhat has RHEL and Fedora,
there is Jboss Community Edition, and JBoss Professional edition.

Nothing is nerfed, in fact the 'premium' offerings are usually behind the free
versions in terms of features, but they do offer better management, upgrade
options, etc.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
JBoss has a long tradition of not leaving anything out of its free versions.
To the contrary, as you noted, one usually does not get support for the more
bleeding edge features under a support agreement (although one JBoss project
group I know personally of has tended to provide that support in practice to
paying customers).

I think the fear is that the "good stuff" for the JVM will only be available
in paid form.

SpringSource now employs a pretty high percentage of the Tomcat committers and
offers it's "TC server," a non-free version of Tomcat with a bunch of
managability features on top. No one seems too upset about this. Perhaps
because there are so many other servlet container choices out there?

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linuxhansl
As much as I believe that Oracle squandered a unique opportunity to generate a
lot of good will without much cost, this is not all bad news.

If I read this correctly the jRocket VM will be part of the OpenJDK and hence
be open source.

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bmelton
JRockit was already a premium JVM.

OpenJDK was already free.

This isn't really an announcement, per se, but what I like about it is that it
means they're going to continue working on JRockit (that they got from BEA's
acquisition).

I've seen gains of over 100% using JRockit with Weblogic, which I also worried
might fall by the wayside with Oracle's acquisition.

I'm still not 100% sure on which way Webcenter is headed, and what exactly
it's based on (as I'm not in that particular business anymore) -- but
hopefully it scrapped all the aging AquaLogic code that BEA was still peddling
as 'cutting edge'.

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mahmud
Oracle doesn't do fremium.

All their evil aside, you gotta respect their "FU, pay me" attitude.

~~~
dschobel
How is it any different from other massive enterprise focussed company (IBM,
MS, et al) and why does it merit respect?

~~~
mahmud
You mean, the MS and IBM that are releasing free software and generally
_trying_ to create and foster communities?

Instead of MS and IBM, we should compare Oracle to Sun, and see how Sun's
policies are being reversed in all public-facing fronts.

~~~
davidw
> see how Sun's policies are being reversed in all public-facing fronts.

Like "making money"?

Kidding aside, I think you can mix free with proprietary in a way that's
beneficial to the community without giving away too much. Google seems to do a
lot of open source these days even though there is tons of stuff they keep to
themselves. They seem to have a decent image for the work they do perform.

Sun had sort of a weird image, IMO - they were kind of heel-draggers in some
ways, ahead of the curve in others. More than anything they just seemed
confused. I don't think that, overall, they ever really figured out open
source and what they should do with it.

Oracle's ideas about open source seem to be along the lines of "take what we
can, give as little as possible back". We'll see though...

~~~
8ren
Sun's revenue came from workstations, which got disrupted by PCs. Everything
else drove that.

~~~
lani
1) enterprise servers 2) Java which drives enterprise computing which runs on
any platform. Didn't these two things work against each other for Sun ?

~~~
badmash69
Not really. Remember Sun's stock during the dotcom boom.

Sun failed because of poor execution. They blew the cloud computing
opportunity. Their sales people did not chase orders like the HP guys did
(this is for a personal experience ). Their Java application server sucked
when compared to Websphere and Weblogic. They could not deliver a good story
with MySQL acquisition. They let Linux get ahead of Solaris , at least in mind
share.

