I can only speak for myself, but around 1997 MS totally dominated the desktop marketplace, and made also significant inroads into server territory (Linux wasn't

I can only speak for myself, but around 1997 MS totally dominated the desktop marketplace, and made also significant inroads into server territory (Linux wasn't a thing as enterprise server O/S until around 2003), so Java and Sun was seen by many as a way to evade MS ActiveX/COM/VB programming, and to save Unix. And that was accomplished indeed. Java thrived on the dot-com bubble when large amounts of e-commerce backends were developed, many of which being maintained until today due to Java's very strong backward compatibility. Java continued to be a strong choice for the server-side because of the massive mindshare and ecosystem. Today I'm not sure where Java is heading. I don't blame Oracle for trying to make money from Java, but recent news - releases being quickly pulled from downloads except for money, unbundling of packages from the JRE/JDK, deprecation of JEE/transfer to the Eclipse foundation, Graal/Truffle being commercial offerings rather than part of OpenJDK, the nashorn JavaScript engine being deprecated, etc. - seem out of character for what Java has stood for most of the time. For the first time in many years it's plausible (though not certain!) that Java use is going to slowly demise once a tipping point is reached where new developers aren't going to invest into it. As to maven: when it was new I hated it with a passion. As time went by it was growing on me because of it's predictability when you're working as freelancer on many projects. Even npm/yarn respectfully mention it as the inspiration and reference for a successfull and mostly well-designed package manager.