There is none, appart from making the Oracle employees life easier. They don't have to deal with the backlash of breaking customers by accident when touching pr

There is none, appart from making the Oracle employees life easier. They don't have to deal with the backlash of breaking customers by accident when touching private APIs, so it gives them more liberty. They decided to take the blow in one go, instead of spread over time. Now, the blow was bigger then they thought, so they've retracted and spread the change over Java 9 and 10, by making 9 an optional setting, and saying 10 will be the cutoff. In an ideal world, it makes sense. This is defensive programming, they're protecting themselves against unplanned usages of their libraries. That's always good when you're a maintainer. You know how annoying it is when you're trying to change and improve things and you realize you can't because someone was using your stuff in a completely dysfunctional way and now you'd break them if you proceeded. But in a practical world, the world of business especially. You should also know that part of the popularity of your software comes from all those use cases users have managed to somehow satisfy without you explicitly planning and building them. Take those away, and your software also loses a lot of value, until you reimplement all these use cases in a more sane way. Tjis will take time, and your customers might move on to something else. We'll see how this impacts Java.