Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/06/oracle_dueling_jvms/

by alt_ • 16 years ago

65 66 16 years ago

theregister.co.uk

mahmud2• 16 years ago

Oracle doesn't do fremium.

All their evil aside, you gotta respect their "FU, pay me" attitude.

dschobel2• 16 years ago

How is it any different from other massive enterprise focussed company (IBM, MS, et al) and why does it merit respect?

mahmud2• 16 years ago

You mean, the MS and IBM that are releasing free software and generally trying to create and foster communities?

Instead of MS and IBM, we should compare Oracle to Sun, and see how Sun's policies are being reversed in all public-facing fronts.

dreur• 16 years ago

Just after announcing that IBM will be working with them on OpenJDK

lukev• 16 years ago

I have no problem with them releasing a commercial JVM with extra bells and whistles and middleware - most people don't need that anyway, and the few who do are more than willing to pay.

But they had better not nerf OpenJDK relative to what it can do now.

skymt• 16 years ago

Fortunately they can't do that. It's GPL'd, no take-backs. They could conceivably remove things from future releases, but I'd expect to see a community fork in that case.

pquerna• 16 years ago

There is no patent license in the GPLv2.

Their decision to keep it on GPL v2 is very very explicit.

tommi• 16 years ago

I wonder if Apple's decision to deprecate Java on Mac was based on these plans.

lwhi2• 16 years ago

How would Apple have known about them?

eitland• 16 years ago

Hint: The company that aquired Sun is Oracle. They have a proven track record for monetizing stuff.

badmash695• 16 years ago

To programmers, Sun seemed earnest about its intentions. Thats why we adopted its Platform. Could anyone name one guy like James Gosling in Oracle ? Didn't thinks so.

With Oracle, everything they do with Java seems to be slimy. Suing Google, JCP elections ( Hologic ?? ). premium for JVM . I fear this trend is to continue.

There are those who think that Oracle would continue to invest in Open JDK and continue to evolve it. I am sure they also believe that MySQl has an even brighter future ahead of it.

The unfortunate sideffect is that cool new languages like Scala and Clojure could end up as collateral damage as JVM is no longer seen as a viable and open platform.

I just might have to bite the bullet and learn me some Haskell after all !! Or GO programming language.

gaius5• 16 years ago

I was going to say Bob Miner and Ed Oates but I've just checked and neither of them is a current Oracle employee.

Why is "suing Google" automatically slimy? They're a corporation like any other. In fact they're not unlike Oracle was at a similar age...

badmash695• 16 years ago

IMHO all law suites over patents in software are slimy. This my opinion as a programmer. If you are indeed a programmer, please feel free to look at this and tell me if you see any of the stuff mentioned in the lawsuit not fairly obvious. http://www.theserverside.com/report/The-Oracle-Google-Patent... . I do not think algorithms should be patentable as this stifles innovation. Oracle vs. Google lawsuit would be fun to watch -- if you like the "SAW" movies.

narrator4• 16 years ago

I think the best option for the community is to stick to JDK 1.6 and never upgrade. If people get sick of the Java language going nowhere they can just use Scala on JDK 1.6, or some sort of fork of the Java language that compiles to bytecode that runs on 1.6, etc. I really can't see any of the open source projects embracing the commercial feature set.

1.6 is a really great platform. I don't see it being obsoleted, at least on the server side, for at least 5 more years and no doubt code will live on in production that runs on 1.6 practically forever.

8ren2• 16 years ago

That makes sense, but people really like to see a future before investing (money or sweat).

melling• 16 years ago

This is really bad idea. Java and the JVM can still be greatly improved. Closures, fixing generics, tail call optimization, module system, faster startup, etc.

JavaFX will be a nice improvement once it's integrated with Java.

TallGuyShort• 16 years ago

So when Oracle monetizes it's products it's slimy, eh? What about when hackers do it for their apps?

maxawaytoolong• 16 years ago

Most people do indeed consider it slimy when "hackers" package up something that used to be open source and start selling it. And, hackers generally don't have the power to turn off the free and open source versions of the project, or start suing people, like Oracle does.

badmash695• 16 years ago

Its bait and switch-- thats what makes it slimy. With Sun at helm, you never had to wonder if your JVM was intentionally crippled.

I stayed with Java because it was write once run everywhere (on the server side). Oracle is making it into write once, renew your license annually on every platform for every CPU.

Dbug• 16 years ago

>...as JVM is no longer seen as a viable and open platform.

With Apple dropping work on future major updates to the JVM for OS X, Oracle would be wise to speak up promptly indicating what support/development they'll provide for the platform. Apple has done a pretty good job integrating the JVM with OS X. If Oracle is able to continue from the code-base Apple has been using (and perhaps hire some from that Apple team?), announcing those things would certainly add to the believability of robust support actually coming. Apple isn't very likely to want to part with skilled developers though.

If Oracle doesn't get or (still?) have developers with heavy OS X experience, and perhaps some code to build on, one has to wonder if/when they could ever deliver a quality release for the platform.

hga4• 16 years ago

To the extent that Clojure's heath depends on the Java ecosystem, that's true.

To the extent that Clojure is the next big Lisp as many are predicting, not so. The development of Clojure-in-Clojure will make it relatively easy to do more specific platform backends (e.g. x86_64 POSIX); some of us with no love of Java (or of OOP or in extreme need of existing Java libraries) are looking forward to that day.

And while this won't appeal to many, Clojure was originally targeted to the CLR as well as the JVM. Rich Hickey punted his CLR efforts when he decided he'd prefer developing the language at twice the rate, but others have resurrected it.

narrator4• 16 years ago

Hey whatever happened to Parrot? You know the common VM for Perl and Python that was supposed to be the basis for Perl6?

Here's an old HN story about it. In fact, in the comments someone proposes porting Clojure to Parrot: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552850

narrator4• 16 years ago

Has anyone played around with LLVM's JVM Implementation? It supposedly runs Tomcat and Eclipse...

http://vmkit.llvm.org/

DjDarkman• 16 years ago

I really wonder 5 years from now what will be the impact of all this. It seems that Oracle's strategy is to squeeze out every bit of penny from the assets acquired from Sun, which is fine I guess, but I think they are taking it too far.

I am starting not to trust Java,MySQL and all other products, they really give me the impression that these will all be commercial-only.

runT1ME• 16 years ago

I think people are reading too much into this. Redhat has RHEL and Fedora, there is Jboss Community Edition, and JBoss Professional edition.

Nothing is nerfed, in fact the 'premium' offerings are usually behind the free versions in terms of features, but they do offer better management, upgrade options, etc.

ShabbyDoo• 16 years ago

JBoss has a long tradition of not leaving anything out of its free versions. To the contrary, as you noted, one usually does not get support for the more bleeding edge features under a support agreement (although one JBoss project group I know personally of has tended to provide that support in practice to paying customers).

I think the fear is that the "good stuff" for the JVM will only be available in paid form.

SpringSource now employs a pretty high percentage of the Tomcat committers and offers it's "TC server," a non-free version of Tomcat with a bunch of managability features on top. No one seems too upset about this. Perhaps because there are so many other servlet container choices out there?

bmelton• 16 years ago

JRockit was already a premium JVM.

OpenJDK was already free.

This isn't really an announcement, per se, but what I like about it is that it means they're going to continue working on JRockit (that they got from BEA's acquisition).

I've seen gains of over 100% using JRockit with Weblogic, which I also worried might fall by the wayside with Oracle's acquisition.

I'm still not 100% sure on which way Webcenter is headed, and what exactly it's based on (as I'm not in that particular business anymore) -- but hopefully it scrapped all the aging AquaLogic code that BEA was still peddling as 'cutting edge'.

linuxhansl• 16 years ago

As much as I believe that Oracle squandered a unique opportunity to generate a lot of good will without much cost, this is not all bad news.

If I read this correctly the jRocket VM will be part of the OpenJDK and hence be open source.

Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs

Related Stories