It's the 23rd Century. Earth, emboldened by the success of its contacts with "alien" regimes and cultures, decides to venture too close to the space of a more elusive (but definitely to-be-reckoned with) culture. One of its "alien" consultants, a cynical (yet often Quixotic) old hand from a fading empire comments, "Ahhhh, I see that you have managed to combine arrogance and stupidity: How efficient of you."
And so I--quite appropriately, mind you!--raise my glass to Londo Mollari, future Emperor of the Centauri Republic in the Babylon 5 universe for summing up precisely how I feel about Oracle's conduct in the Java Community Process. Or perhaps not quite. I would add "hypocrisy" to "arrogance and stupidity" and make it a hat-trick...or the trifecta of #FAIL.
But the larger point is Oracle cannot possibly have the programmers necessary to sustain its Java middleware efforts and support its flagship database products. Neither can its enemy-of-my-enemy "friends" like IBM. Thus, there's a certain care and feeding necessary for the developers who maintain the amenities that make the language attractive:
- Coding software (a.k.a. Integrated Development Environments, or IDEs) such as NetBeans, Eclipse (no connection to vampires, werewolves or sulky-looking jailbait!), and BlueJ
- Testing software, mostly meaning JUnit
- Build software, mostly meaning Ant
- Web application servers, such as Tomcat, Jetty and JBoss
- Databases (e.g. Derby) and database connectors (e.g. JDBC for Derby, MySQL, etc.)
- Etc.
- Yadayadayadayada
- And so forth
In short, a whole lot of programmers devote uncounted hours of free time to what can quite accurately be described as an ecosystem built around that language. And, frankly, I simply cannot wrap my brain around the short-sightedness of Oracle's attitude. Granted, the Apache Foundation is not the only large faction in the open source world, but it draws one heck of a lot of water. Which--to extend the ecosystem analogy--makes Oracle's belligerent attitude tantamount to clear-cutting, mountaintop removal, strip-mining, ghost-netting, shark-finning, or any other particularly nasty bit of corporate hubris you can name--up to and including Deepwater Horizon.
All of which makes me incredibly sad, because Java has been my favorite language for a decade. Why? Because it Just Makes Sense. Period. Unlike the disjointed, steaming messes that are Objective-C and ActionScript--which don't provide functionality so much as they splatter them across what Apple and Adobe fondly imagine to be APIs (Apple being by far the worse culprit). Moreover, Java is a language can power huge, data-backed websites as well as desktop and even cellphone applications.
Fifteen years is a lot of legacy for any language--and the tools that grow up around it. But in the long run, the internet is a primordial soup for new programming languages and platforms. There's no going back to Borland's heyday. Microsoft gets away with charging for its toolset because of the integration aspect, and for all I know that may be part of what Oracle has in mind.
Technically, as the buyers of Sun's assets, they legally can do what they please with them, including perpetuating the non-cooperation they deplored Back In The Day. But one thing they'd better not do is be surprised when one of the open source "forks" of the language does to them what Firefox did to Internet Explorer.
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* The prophesies of the original Oracle of ancient Greece were, by tradition, inspired by inhaling the fumes from a volcanic vent, over which the temple at Delphi was situated.
