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> I think it really fell out of favor due to Oracle's litigious handling of it. Thanks for the info. Didn’t know this. I use AdoptOpenJDK and am grateful the f

• api 5y ago
  I have heard about Java quite a bit more ever since Oracle lost against Google at the Supreme Court. I don't think that's a coincidence.
• twic 5y ago
  Back in the day, Java came from Sun, who were generally pretty cool about it. Oracle bought Sun in 2010, things looked okay for a year or two, then it started to get scary. The situation now is not scary: there is a community process to manage the language and library definitions, the JDK is open source, with Oracle contributing, there are other significant contributors (notably RedHat and IBM ... so now just IBM), and there are multiple freely-available high quality binary releases of the same source. It could potentially get scary again. If Oracle stop contributing to the open source JDK, and instead work on a closed-source version of their own, then it's not clear that there is enough developer power among the remaining contributors to keep things moving at a healthy speed. But then, if that happened, maybe users would abandon Java rather than pay Oracle, so it would be a suicidal move for Oracle. Or, if that happened, other contributors could step up contributions to hoover up customers from Oracle. But it's not entirely reassuring to be depending on game theory like this.