IBM gave up their VM (J9) and now uses OpenJDK as their primary VM, on which they build many, many enterprise products. I think they're about as "big" as you ca

IBM gave up their VM (J9) and now uses OpenJDK as their primary VM, on which they build many, many enterprise products. I think they're about as "big" as you can hope to become. If Oracle does anything nefarious preventing someone from using the JVM in a commercial fashion, I'd imagine IBM's army of litigators would be the first to submit their grievances to whichever civil court held jurisdiction. Historically IBM been a huge OSS contributor over the last 15 years- starting with Eclipse in 2001. The license for the JDK anyways is good ol' GPL v2 so they really can't take the OpenJDK out of the community[1]. I'm not sure about "Java the language", and I'm really not sure about things like Hotspot and JRocket. But Oracle can do about as much to take away the OpenJDK from the community as Linus can remove Linux. [1] No license flame wars please.