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> For starters none of those projects has parity with Java's JIT and GC implementations. Aren't you forgetting about Linux, Firefox and Mesa graphics library t
by the_grue 8y ago
> For starters none of those projects has parity with Java's JIT and GC implementations.
Aren't you forgetting about Linux, Firefox and Mesa graphics library to name a few? You seem to imply that all open source is amateur's work by definition, which is obviously wrong, as many large-profile, complex open-source projects are maintained by professional developers, employed by powerful companies to work for the benefit of the whole industry. Besides, it's one thing to develop GC from scratch and another to maintain an existing one and backport fixes.
> Those that kind of do, are sponsored by corporations not much different from Oracle, other than some geek love.
There is nothing wrong in being sponsored by corporations, especially if it's a collaboration between several players, as opposed to a single one. The problems only start when these corporations overtake the maintenance completely and then start leveraging it against the users.
> Oracle was the company that rescued Java
Pah'lease! Rescued... Oracle just bought Sun's intellectual property and trademarks in hopes of monetizing them later. Guess what, later is now! The only reason Java was in trouble during Sun's time in the first place is because of Sun's proprietary attitude under the pretense of safeguarding the Java standard and preventing fragmentation. It's that attitude that first caused the Java development to stall when Sun ran out of steam and now it has brought us to the spot where the project maintainer is denying us security patches.
- pjmlp 8y agoLinux, Firefox and Mesa wouldn't be where they are without the generous contributions from IBM, SGI, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, HP, Cray and many others. If it would be only about donations and community, I would still be using Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, or any other commercial UNIX platform. It doesn't matter what were their ultimate reasons, no other company besides IBM bothered to make an offer, and even IBM did not care enough to cover Oracle's offer. Google was specially bad in this, after having torpedoed Sun with Android and not caring one second to rescue it. Why bother they already had gotten what they wanted and with luck they might just managed to get off with it. So yes, Oracle did rescue Java, if it was up the community, maybe we would have an open source version stuck with Java 6 features and that was all about it. GCJ has proven how much the community is able to achieve regarding Java high quality implementations.
- the_grue 8y agoYou are drawing conclusions based on arbitrary facts. GCJ has always been going against the grain both politically and technologically, no wonder it ended up where it did. There are strong efforts and weak efforts. The fact that many projects fail doesn't mean that it's a bad idea for this specific project to be maintained by a community. And no, "community" doesn't necessarily mean unaffiliated developers, they can be affiliated, like I have already stated many times, and still collectively considered a community. Open source can be a collaborative effort by major players or it can be a hopeless attempt to catch up with such. For the last 15 years or even more, it has been a common practice to commoditize technologies that are widely used across the industry. Java fully fits the above description, so maintaining it by a strong community effort would be a natural fit. Actually, from what I know, it almost works like that right now, we just need to take the licensing power from Oracle's greedy hands and keep the process the same as it is.