Oracle Is Making Friends, Showing Community Leadership
When Oracle acquired Sun, you could hear the internet cacophony scream: “Java is dead! Oracle will destroy it! It’s part of the monolith now!”
Not so fast.
It hasn’t been widely talked about (but deserves to be), but Oracle is doing pretty much the exact opposite of what those involved with Java and the Java Community Process feared: it’s being open, inclusive and a smart community leader. In fact, as OpenJDK has put some meat on its bones, Oracle has brought almost every big-time stakeholder into the fold of the OpenJDK initiative.
Back on December 1st, the SD Times had a quiet blurb about this whole thing:
Winning over IBM was a huge coup for Oracle, especially when you consider the fact that IBM is the one company that competes most obliquely with Oracle in hardware, database and software markets. And being able to keep Red Hat signed onto the project was another big win for Oracle: The company takes Red Hat’s Linux as CentOS and rebrands it with its own kernel version and logos.
And yet, both IBM and Red Hat are dedicated to the OpenJDK. Combine this with the news from Nov. 12 that Apple will also be joining the OpenJDK, and you’ve got quite an alliance of Java stakeholders all working on a single, unified Java.
And here I’ll echo the SD Times’ closing sentiments: with any luck, Java will emerge from this – with the backing of the industry’s biggest players – with a stronger, more mature, more battle-tested ecosystem.
Kudos to Oracle for swiftly and cleanly doing what many said it couldn’t.
(Thx Jim)
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