[51CTO Foreign News Headlines on January 25] Under the control of Oracle, will the Java community regain its former glory? Manufacturers of Java products seem to have different views, and many users are worried that Java will be subject to stricter control. The opinions expressed in this article by spokespersons for the three major Java vendors, Red Hat, SpringSource and Terracotta, represent the thoughts of these Java vendors to a certain extent.
According to previous reports from 51CTO, the European Union has announced that it has unconditionally approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun, which means that the last barrier to the acquisition has disappeared (see 51CTO's special topic on Oracle's acquisition of Sun). Mark Little, chief technology officer of the Red Hat middleware department and a member of the JCP (Java Community Process) executive committee, expressed his concerns in an interview. He is worried that Oracle and Sun may have very different management of Java.
Because Oracle is more focused than Sun on commoditizing the technology, it is likely to exert tighter control over Java, Little warned. Sun's control over the Java language itself and supporting standards is relatively loose, and it also allows the emergence and development of a new Java vendor ecosystem. If Oracle strengthens its control over Java for its own benefit, it may limit the prosperity of the entire Java middleware industry. . (Currently, the JBoss project under Red Hat is one of the leading Java middleware platforms in the Java industry. Some time ago, the update of JBoss was directed towards the Java middleware cloud platform. Therefore, Red Hat is not worried about this. unreasonable)
Rod Johnson, general manager of VMware's SpringSource division, has a more optimistic view. "I don't think Oracle will do anything detrimental to Java," Johnson said. "Oracle is not a stupid company."
Oracle's spokesperson declined to disclose what plans Oracle will take for Java, but according to arrangements, they will conduct a webcast on January 27 to explain in detail how various technologies originally supervised by Sun, including Java, OpenOffice and MySQL, will enter Oracle's strategy. Roadmap, let’s wait and see. (Reference reading: According to previous reports by 51CTO, Oracle announced an informal strategic roadmap for Sun products in October 2009, which can be compared on January 27)
Oracle once stated that Java was an important purpose of their acquisition of Sun. Regarding the impact of the transaction on Sun's customers, Oracle described that they plan to "not only expand and accelerate investment in the Java platform itself, but also continue to increase its commitment to the community and help Java become a ubiquitous innovative platform. ”
Little believes that under Sun's control, Java's development has never encountered any serious problems. "Sun does a good job as a supervisor," he said. "They are like a benevolent parent in some ways."
For example, under this kind of benign supervision, even if Java became very popular, Sun did not set up any economic obstacles in the Java middleware market. Sun did not compete with HP, IBM or BEA. It was only when they began to push the GlassFish application server (refer to reading: Ten years of development of GlassFish) that the JCP Standard Edition/Enterprise Edition committee began to feel some pressure from Sun.
What worries Little is that Oracle has a large Java middleware business, which could have an unfair impact on competition. After Oracle acquired BEA, which provides WebLogic Server, in 2008, it competed directly with Red Hat's application server and supporting software JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.
Little speculated that Oracle may set up obstacles for Java middleware competitors, such as charging usage specification fees or refusing to recognize that a product conforms to Java standards.
Of course, Little also admitted, "There is currently no sign that Oracle will play this card. This is just a worst-case scenario." So far, Oracle is still an active contributor to JCP and has actually been promoting the open source development process. .
SpringSource's Johnson pointed out that most Java development today no longer relies on the Java language and Sun, and can basically be completed through software tools provided by other organizations built on Java. "The Java community is not as dependent on Sun as it was five or 10 years ago," Johnson said. The editor of 51CTO believes that Johnson's views are in line with the trend. Readers can refer to the article "The Future of Java: A Hundred Schools of Thought Confronting the JVM".
If Oracle made an unpopular decision, "the community would be divided," Johnson said, and their work wouldn't be called Java. However, this fear is unlikely to happen. "Many of Oracle's core projects are incredibly dependent on Java," Johnson said. "Keeping Java itself healthy will make Oracle a lot of money, and it will be more rigorous than using Java." There are far more unwelcome means of control.”
Amit Pandey, CEO of Terracotta, agrees with this view (51CTO editor’s note: Terracotta is a vendor engaged in Java open source caching platform). He also said that the current Java community has developed large enough. If Oracle has any attempt to restrict Java technology, Developers will find other ways to get around these obstacles. Terracotta provides software for extending Java applications across multiple servers. They compete directly with Oracle's Coherence series of software and have been in discussions with the European Union for an acquisition.
"It's always a little nerve-wracking to think that Java will be managed by Oracle, a non-open source leader," Pandey said. "But it's clear that Oracle is not going to take Java lightly, especially since they have a large portion of their revenue on it. Java can do it.”
[51CTO.com translation, please do not reproduce without authorization. When reprinting on cooperative sites, please indicate the original translator and source as 51CTO.com, and the original content may not be modified. 】
Original text: Java's future uncertain under Oracle's grip Author: Joab Jackson