....quietly reminding the "good, Java sucks anyway" crowd that a vast amount of actually-quite-important commercial software has the JRE as a dep. Like, ok at

....quietly reminding the "good, Java sucks anyway" crowd that a vast amount of actually-quite-important commercial software has the JRE as a dep. Like, ok at my end, I kind of shelled out for a license for JetBrains DataGrip, and I'll be really pissed when it stops working on my laptop. Oh, right, and what if I need to use Gephi? I mean, it pisses me off regularly, but for some stuff it's, like, the only sane way to proceed. Is that just another oops? Suddenly my Linux desktop is looking a lot less appetizing. I've been complaining about this problem for two decades: FOSS has a boring-work problem: most maintenance jobs are not exciting, and yield minimal recognition while taking up enormous amounts of time. It's simply irrational to do them. Commercial software manages this by paying people to do boring work, compensating people with dollars for their otherwise-irrational decision (making it rational.) The pot can be sweetened as need be to keep 'bums in seats'. But because we compensate one another in attention and reputation (in a manner that is surprisingly reminiscent of the Artworld), we can't just collectively decide to find e.g. maintaining a critical part of the past twenty years of computing patrimony is as hot as greenfielding "X, but in Rust." (and I say this as a burgeoning Rust dev -- it's a beautiful language and ecosystem, no offense meant.) I mean, we can work on a cultural shift, but we'd best get started as it will take years.