Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Java JAVA Java

Oracle and Sun. Well, I had to write about it. Another voice in the crowd, but still - having worked on Java for almost 10 years now, I felt that I had to say something.

I guess we all saw this coming. It had to happen eventually. Sun was just running aground with year after year of loss making.

That apart, what almost all of us are really interested in is really what direction Java will go under the captaincy of Oracle. Just 2 weeks ago, we were all warming up to the idea of IBM taking over Sun/Java and now almost overnight we see a complete turn of events.

I guess the thought of IBM owning Java would not have troubled us as much as Oracle owning Java. IBM is not new to working in/with the Community, no matter how half-hearted their attempts were/are. See Eclipse. And then Derby. Perhaps Eclipse alone redeems them. But Oracle? Will they still play nice with IBM and WebSphere? How about the little guys like Apache, JBoss, Spring and the rest of us mortals? Will the vibrant and thriving Java community still live?

Questions..and more questions. Only time will tell. There is no doubt that Java platform itself will grow stronger, but will it remain freely available and accessible to everyone without having to shell out $$$ to Oracle?

All we can hope is that Oracle will embrace Java and the Community rather than constrict it like a boa.

And of course we all know what will become of MySQL. All the startups, Web 2.0 and Cloud companies that relied so heavily on this will begin to wonder why they did not use PostGRES.

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