Apache quits JCP ... who next?

[Stuart Grimshaw]

Now that Apache has told the JCP to go and play on the dual
carriageway, Google probably aren't too far behind, but IBM have
thrown their lot in with Oracle on OpenJDK we're starting to see the
big hitters line up behind 2 separate JVM's (3 if you include Dalvik
as separate from Harmony).

Are we going to see real competition in JVMs? One of the first thing
most people do when installing Debian or Ubuntu is remove the default
JVM & install Sun's because the performance is so poor, hopefully
we'll start to see the kind of speed wars we saw last year between
Chrome & Firefox, though Oracle's glacier like corporate speed might
slow that race down.


Has anyone been following the bun fought between Oracle & the hudson
community? That's all going to end in tears too.

[James Jefferies]

> Are we going to see real competition in JVMs?

Well we partly did have competition with jrocket and the IBM JVM, but
as jrocket and the sun JVM are merging, that's one down.

> One of the first thing
> most people do when installing Debian or Ubuntu is remove the default
> JVM & install Sun's because the performance is so poor, hopefully
> we'll start to see the kind of speed wars we saw last year between
> Chrome & Firefox, though Oracle's glacier like corporate speed might
> slow that race down.

It would be fantastic, the Sun/Oracle JVM is such a fantastic bit of
software with a lot of very clever optimisation. You'd hope that an
Apache/Google/OpenSource effort could do a similar job, with all the
clever folk involved in the respective companies/communities.

>
> Has anyone been following the bun fought between Oracle & the hudson
> community? That's all going to end in tears too.

That is a joke too - Oracle should be playing very softly softly
around the community, rather than a) making a genuine mistake b)
followed by throwing their weight around.

As a committed Java advocate, it's all leaving a bad taste in my
mouth. But what else could I do? I'm not going down the MS route and
I'm not sure I want to pick up Rails or PHP either :/

[Ed Bowler]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 4:39 PM, James Jefferies
<jamesje...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Are we going to see real competition in JVMs?
>
> Well we partly did have competition with jrocket and the IBM JVM, but
> as jrocket and the sun JVM are merging, that's one down.

And IBM have thrown in with openjdk (i.e. sun's jvm) then no - i think
we have less competition now than pre-oracle.

>> One of the first thing
>> most people do when installing Debian or Ubuntu is remove the default
>> JVM & install Sun's because the performance is so poor, hopefully
>> we'll start to see the kind of speed wars we saw last year between
>> Chrome & Firefox, though Oracle's glacier like corporate speed might
>> slow that race down.
>
> It would be fantastic, the Sun/Oracle JVM is such a fantastic bit of
> software with a lot of very clever optimisation. You'd hope that an
> Apache/Google/OpenSource effort could do a similar job, with all the
> clever folk involved in the respective companies/communities.

actually openjdk is now the default for many distros, so I tend to
just use that TBH

>> Has anyone been following the bun fought between Oracle & the hudson
>> community? That's all going to end in tears too.
>
> That is a joke too - Oracle should be playing very softly softly
> around the community, rather than a) making a genuine mistake b)
> followed by throwing their weight around.
>
> As a committed Java advocate, it's all leaving a bad taste in my
> mouth. But what else could I do? I'm not going down the MS route and
> I'm not sure I want to pick up Rails or PHP either :/

projects like hudson and openjdk will just show oracle what open
source software is all about and fork. Nobody in their right mind is
going to use a barely supported piece of software from a control freak
company that thinks it can control people's behavior by owning a
couple of trademarks and waving it's collective dick around. It would
take a few months of pain, but pretty quickly the word'd get out that
hudson's name had changed, and you now get it from a new url. Java is
just going to end up being run like all the other open source
languages (like ruby, perl and python) funded by companies that use it
(like google, red hat and ibm) and run on mailing lists and at
conferences, and the jcp will evaporate into there being a standard
implementation that you use .... openjdk. I guess in many ways it's a
shame that the competition is gone, but then in many ways the
competition in kernels has dropped since linux came out too, since
it's easier to implement your fancy new scheduling algorithm as part
of that than it is to start from scratch ... infrastructure eventually
becomes a commodity