Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

Regarding measurements: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

Also, I am very interested to see new benchmark results once AOT SubstrateVM will be more widely adopted in JVM community. Demo: https://youtu.be/MN6jNIwl2FQ?t=1136

RedHat already working on a framework which takes full benefit of that: https://quarkus.io/

All in all, with upcoming value types, SubstrateVM adoption, fibers and nice languages improvements like records, future is brighter than ever for Java.

Edit. Regarding JVM vs CLR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15955685

Probably true for GPLv3, because GPLv3 actually says that it is irrevocable. OpenJDK is under GPLv2, which does not say anything about revocation. It is an open question whether or not GPLv2 can be revoked.

> Additionally, the GPL has this nifty "Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients" clause. In other words, if you put some code out there under the GPL, there is no way for you to un-GPL that particular code

That clause actually makes it more likely that GPLv2 could be at least partly revoked, because the full text is:

> Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor [...]

It's that "original licensor" part that makes partial revocation a possibility.

What if the original licensor simply says that they are no longer granting new licenses? Everyone who already has a license can continue to use the software, but new recipients no longer can get a license? (That's what I meant by "partly revoked" earlier--existing copies remain OK, but the spread of them, or derivative works of them, is stopped).

What happens then is a mess. Even figuring out who has standing to sue to try to make license issuing continue is a mess, getting into such questions as whether the unspecified future downstream recipients of copies are intentional beneficiaries or incidental beneficiaries of the contract. (And then there is the whole "is this a license or a contract?" issue which is very murky).

BTW, even licenses that do say they are irrevocable might suffer from this partial revocation danger if downstream recipients must get their license from the original licensor.

The fix to this is to allow sublicensing in your license. Make your license irrevocable (so that once someone gets a licensed copy it cannot be taken back), and allow sublicensing so that when someone distributes a copy the license for that copy comes from them rather than you. Then if you stop issuing new licenses there is no problem, because people get their licenses from their distributor.

If you don't want distributors to be able to give their downstream less rights than you gave them by only sublicensing a subset of those rights, you can put in the license a clause that requires distributors to sublicense all the rights.

A nice side effect of the sublicensing approach is distributors have standing to sue for license violations. Under the GPL-type approach, where all licenses are directly from the original licensor, only the original licensor can sue to enforce the license. Under the sublicensing approach, both the original licensor can sue (alleging copyright infringement) and the distributor can sue (alleging violation of the license).

When Microsoft mentions thier “strategies” for various .Net languages, you notice which one is missing?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-net-language-strat...

I’m very much a .Net fan but it makes about as much since as a developer to tie your fate to .Net framework or Windows only development in general in 2019 as it did for all of the companies not to move from VB6 after .Net was the future.

Even Azure host more Linux VMs than Windows.

Don't know about kool-aid, but if you want to do interesting platform work -- on GC, compilers or low-overhead observability -- you could work at Microsoft on .NET, at Google on V8 (or Go), or at Mozilla on WebAssembly, but the truly cutting-edge, state-of-the-art work is done at Oracle on the JDK (and related projects like Graal), which is where I get to lead a project to add delimited continuations and fibers to the JDK. We're obviously keeping an eye on what's going on elsewhere, and while there are certainly great ideas out there (some we're happy to steal, as others steal from us) we look around and don't see similar overall technological leadership elsewhere. That's not to say others won't pick up mindshare or win certain niches, or that technological leadership is the determining factor, but if you're in interested in the technology and familiar with what people are doing, it's hard to deny that Java is ahead of the pack in the technologies I mentioned.

> there isn’t a whole lot of mindshare going towards java these days. At least in regards to new FOSS projects.

I'm not sure your numbers are correct. Java is not the only game in town as it was for a few years in the first half of the naughts, but "not a whole lot of mindshare" seems to be detached from reality. I can't predict the future, but remember when PHP had all the mindshare and totally killed Java? Remember when Ruby did the same? I would like to think that Java still being the leading server-side platform after being killed over and over has something to do with its technical excellence, but I know that's being naive. Nevertheless, wishful thinking on the part of some don't make reality, and usual fluctuations don't make a trend. Eventually, something will kill Java -- or at least mark its true lasting decline -- but it doesn't seem like that something is here yet.

> I can say that my company’s use of java is diminishing rapidly over the last 5 years too.

That may well be, but we're also seeing companies switching to the Java platform in quite significant numbers, in cases where both performance and observability are top priorities. There seems to be movement inside the Java ecosystem (e.g. among the Java language, Kotlin, Clojure and Scala) or outside it (e.g. people switching among Ruby, Python, Node and Go), but we're not seeing any significant shift away (except on the client side, where the browser has won). There are also certain niches, like machine learning, where the Java platform isn't number one, but it's doing much better than Node, Go or .NET.

> Oracle itself is a pariah, the vast majority of the tech industry avoid it.

I'm not a manager, but I'm not sure the numbers support your conclusion. The opinions developers voice on HN and Reddit are... fickle, and don't necessarily reflect market shifts. In any event, the competition doesn't seem to be doing too hot in comparison, either. I can tell you that personally I'm certainly unhappy with some of the things Oracle has done, but at least it's not surveilling on the entire world, putting thousands of small businesses out of business, or getting kids into conspiracy theories. Also, my colleagues are so far not famous for outbursts of racism or misogyny. Now, I admit that’s not exactly high praise, but these days, as far as Big Tech is concerned, that’s not not nothing, either, and I’ll take annoying some other corporations over those any day.

If a EU state refuses to do a thing, that's basically it.

https://piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/france...