"while Oracle spends tens of millions of dollars every year on the several hundreds of full-time OpenJDK engineers it employs. We must support that somehow by g

"while Oracle spends tens of millions of dollars every year on the several hundreds of full-time OpenJDK engineers it employs. We must support that somehow by getting more companies to contribute either directly in code or financially through support subscriptions." An unsustainable situation will continue until it can't --some quote I'm butchering. I'm inclined to agree with you that we need more contributions from outside Oracle. Right now, Oracle is doing most of the work, but isn't happy with the money they're making. That allows those companies to contribute less back, but if Oracle stops doing that work, they'll have to step up, and I think they will. They'll shift some of that effort from internal forks to maintaining the base (those internal forks work well for them precisely because they're building on such a stable base).