Oracle Contributing GraalVM Community Edition Java Code to OpenJDK

There isn't any way to spin it negatively.

The generalized dislike of Oracle you have seen really comes from a couple of different aspects, neither of which are relevant to this specific announcement:

1. License audits suck.

2. The Google lawsuit (about matters resolved long ago and which don't apply to anyone except Google, really).

A lot of ill will comes from people whose companies have been audited. The process is by all accounts very painful. However, what's rarely mentioned in such discussions is the alternatives and why Oracle does this. It's because their software is totally DRM free. It makes sense; you can't have a major airport or bank shutting down suddenly because a license key or credit card expired, can you? Oracle DB is mission critical stuff, it must be always available. That's why they use an audit model - it's "trust but verify". They make their stuff available for free download and you promise not to pirate it.

Every so often Oracle turn up and check to see if you're paying for what you're using. At this point there are usually two problems that crop up:

1. The company doesn't actually know if it's correctly paying for Oracle's stuff. It requires a lot of work to find out, maybe the right controls weren't in place and naughty developers just installed more copies because it was convenient etc. Then they discover they've unknowingly been pirating the DB.

2. And/or they discover they didn't understand the licensing model, which historically had some very sharp edges around virtualization (maybe still does).

Because the downloads are open and unrestricted by any form of DRM, it's easy to make these mistakes in a company that doesn't have good processes in place. At this point the users have a problem because it's just plain old copyright violation. Oracle prefers not to sue its own users for obvious reasons so at this point a third issue crops up - their sales guys like to cut deals. Buy more of our software and you'll have some useful stuff plus we'll forget about your non-compliance issues. Win/win, right? Not always for the people who aren't at the top of the firm of course, who may now be told to adopt some new product that they wouldn't otherwise have chosen and may not even be told why (it's embarrassing for the executives to admit they ended up in that situation!).

It's worth observing that with the cloud these problems go away. Use Oracle DB only in the cloud (or MS SQL etc) and the cloud provider will track your usage and ensure you're paying for it. In turn that means no need for audits.

It's very easy to criticize Oracle for the above outcomes. It's harder to come up with alternative approaches beyond really down in the weeds stuff like the exact ways virtualized cores are licensed, etc. The moment you have a commercial product there needs to be some way to ensure users are paying for it (because a lot simply won't if there's nothing in place to make them), but if you accept that outages cannot be caused by DRM or licensing errors, then you are almost forced to go with either the cloud or the audit+true-up approach. Many modern DB firms go hosted-only which brings its own problems (see the recent Azure leak). Plus Oracle DB predates the cloud, so ...

WASM isn't really a replacement for JVM bytecode. It's not like you can take a random JAR and convert it to WASM. Last I checked, WASM doesn't even support GCd languages at all, and at any rate the whole insight that makes GraalVM unique and a big deal is that universal bytecodes are a poor choice for making fast polyglot VMs. The JVM world was doing that long before WASM was even a twinkle in Google's eye, with invokedynamic and other initiatives, and it kinda works. JRuby+indy is a lot faster than MRI. But, there's a lot of compromises involved.

Truffle is interesting because it says, no, we should not be trying to compile everything to a universal bytecode. Instead, we should JIT compile the source code directly, using the JVM as a runtime library but bypassing the bytecode layer. The language semantics can be expressed much more clearly, without needing to contort things to make them look like Java, whilst still benefiting from the JVM's core feature set.

So really I'd ask it the other way around. If it weren't for the politics of the browser world and the monolithic "Chrome is the OS" approach, would WASM be competitive? Because the Graal team already proved you can run lots of different languages at relatively insane speeds using partial evaluation and bypassing bytecode. The WASM world has proven it can run C++ and Rust at slower speeds than normal, which isn't particularly unexpected. If Chrome and Safari shipped GraalVM accessible via tags, how many people would care about WASM? Remember that you can run WASM and LLVM bitcode on top of GraalVM too, it's not just about textual languages.

Arguably, if you wanted to give the web an instant free upgrade that'd make many developers rejoice, integrating Graal into Chrome would be an overnight way to do it. Python, Ruby, JVM bytecode and any other language you want at V8 like speeds, in a script tag? It's technically possible, it's just not politically possible.

Nothing technical is changing. It's just a change in the development process used by Oracle. A lot of this announcement will be opaque if you don't know the history of Sun, but suffice it to say that the core Java development process has a lot of oddness in it that exists to make Java more open and less controlled by Sun-then-Oracle, for example if you go look at their mailing lists you'll see they "vote" on whether their own new colleagues should be allowed to commit to the source tree. This is basically legacy stuff these days but if I understand correctly was written into various legal agreements.

Anyway, OpenJDK is its own project with its own processes and culture, GraalVM was historically from a totally separate part of Oracle and adopted its own processes and development culture. This announcement doesn't change what tech is available, it's more about re-organizing how development is done. It doesn't really affect Java developers much, except that maybe now more stuff will come out of the box with a 'regular' JDK. Currently to get Graal technology you need to use their own custom spin of the JDK.

I don't think licensing is the only reason people hate Oracle. They have at the very best a mixed record when it comes to open source they've acquired. While they've done pretty well by Java and virtualbox after some initial missteps, other software such as Open office, MySQL, Solaris, ZFS, KSplice, etc has not faired nearly so well...

Thank you for the very detailed response. I recognize that my impression of Oracle was certainly unfair due to my lack of knowledge and experience with them. I also recognize that it was both selfish and ignorant of me to ask for someone to spin this negatively. My comment was in good faith, but I see now that my intention doesn't really change that it was encouraging an unjust characterization of this announcement and was unfairly asking someone else to do the leg work for me.

I guess my default (and flawed) heuristic is to assume that a big corporation has an ulterior motive with goodwill or community-focused announcements. I'll take this as a learning opportunity to not blindly adopt what I perceive as the general sentiment, to stop relying on such a heuristic, and to do my own research and evaluation. In addition to the detailed response, thank you for also indirectly kicking my butt into reevaluating how I approach the unknown both logically and emotionally.