To me, the news is more that they are open-sourcing the hardware acceleration that goes with it. These sort of initiatives should be loudly celebrated; and I t

To me, the news is more that they are open-sourcing the hardware acceleration that goes with it. These sort of initiatives should be loudly celebrated; and I think they will be more common as the end of Moore's law progresses, and as hardware will become less and less generic. My bet: in less than 10 years we're going to see an open source kind of chips like the following: The JavaChip™, maintained by OpenJDK; available at your local cloud, provided by TSMC: * Zipline acceleration for your data needs * GC acceleration * Code and data caches modes specialized for small threads * UTF-8-based datagram dynamic parsing pattern * Explicit prefetcher control * The JVM's profiling data done in the hardware, more extensively * Collections.sort() as a hardware bitonic sort where appropriate * Facilities for predicate pushdown to the SSD / NIC * etc. Basically: all the specificities of your very specific programming model down in the hardware.