I do realize that the continuous stream of Oracle+Sun articles might bore you, however, I feel that I have to add my 2 cents to the subject as the last couple of weeks have been fairly interesting in my professional life.
It started out when one of my former colleagues asked me to check a popular Swedish page on IT. The first article on the page put me in shock: "Oracle buying Sun", it said in bold black letters. Oracle, of all companies? Why oh why! Not that there is anything wrong with the Oracle database or WebLogic, I just hoped that it would be a company with a slightly more open attitude (yes, open as in open source) since the majority of recent advancements in Java were either proposed or contributed by the open source community.
After some hours went by I was starting to reason with myself: Is it so bad? I concluded that it probably is not. What was more damaging to Java were the rumours about Sun possibly going bankrupt (even though we all know now that this was all just trash talk to begin with). We have now one of the largest and richest software companies in the world backing up the technology millions of companies deploy for everything from web pages, mobile games up to mission critical banking and health care systems. These companies can now continue use Java and feel confident that it is not going to disappear anytime soon.
There is another question. Will we end up being locked in to Oracle-only products? I doubt that, too. Oracle may be a closed source company, yet, they know just as well as you and I do that Java's continuing success in the business world is largely based on it's openness and it's community support.
OpenJDK is not going to disappear, JBoss is not going to disappear and Spring is not going to disappear either. Furthermore, more and more languages use Java's mature core (the Java Virtual Machine) to make amazing things possible. Oracle must and will recognize this because despite being a rich company... they don't want to flush more than seven billion dollars down the drain.
I may add that there is one thing that does concern me a little bit. The Oracle and Sun-merger gives Oracle the majority voting power in the Java Community Process. Will they use this power to heavily influence Java EE to their advantage? Possibly, yet, I don't think this is a major concern either. Java is all about freedom of choice and if you or your employer doesn't like the changes in Java EE then you can move to Spring or any other Java-framework which fits your needs without losing the benefits of utilizing a mature platform.
To conclude my post. Yes, Oracle did buy Sun and yes, Oracle is not very known for being open and community-oriented but I do think that Java is strengthened by the merger and that Sun's (soon Oracle's) employees can make a difference at Oracle.
What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts on my point of view!
