I can’t believe I am writing this, but could Oracle be the best thing to happen to OpenJDK? I know that writing 30 posts in 30 days is driving me a little crazy, but have I really lost that many marbles before the halfway point? Just how can the company that is being sued by the US government for their alleged dishonesty be doing good things with such an indispensable open source project?
Well, despite my many misgivings about the delays to all the interesting content in JDK7, their willingness to take the flak and do what is necessary to steady the ship shows they have the guts to make tough decisions. Sun kept promising but never really delivered. If Oracle start delivering regularly then I’ll be less critical of the additional delays to JDK7.
They’ve also persuaded IBM and Apple to join the OpenJDK effort, something which Sun never managed to do. This brings all the major JDK vendors together in one place and hopefully we will see the best features of each of the JDK implementations (IBM, Oracle/BEA, Oracle/Sun and Apple) being merged into the open source offering.
The only question that still nags in the back of my mind is their motive. Whilst it all seems rosy on the surface, persuading IBM to back OpenJDK instead of Apache Harmony could have an ulterior motive. Oracle are attempting to sue Google over the use of Java in Android, and which class libraries do you suppose Android uses? You guessed it, Apache Harmony’s! By getting IBM to switch to OpenJDK, it further isolates Google.
I’m not quite ready to believe that is a co-incidence yet!
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Copyright ©Craig Aspinall 2011