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Nice article, well done!. Me I begin to belive that the Oracle deal with Java after all is not bad it will be good for Java. Oracle wants to blow from earth Microsoft not IBM so Oracle wants to see a healthy Java and improving. So I think Java is and will still be the number one platform and programming language in the world.

Go Go Oracle.

I also started to realize the potential of Oracle after the takeover on Sun. They may in fact position as a real competitor to Microsoft and may push on Java to make sure it won't loose users to .NET once Mono gets somewhat more complete (although it will always be one version behind MS). Let's just hope, they get more open and don't miss that chance.

The only product they will most-likely abandon over time could be MySQL. I'm quite sure nothing else is going to be lost - but unfortunately only time will tell what really happens.

> I'm quite sure nothing else is going to be lost

Hmm, you don't think they will drop Sun's ZFS in favor of their superior (and more license friendly) BTRFS filesystem?

I agree it's probably not bad for us Java folks, I just hope Java itself will get some much needed attention which imho. Sun has neglected over the last couple of years (Look at all the prominent Java people who left and also the JSR's being dropped).

I don't think, GPL is license friendly at all - LGPL, BSD or MIT would be; GPL unfortunately blocks both ways of inclusions (GPL code into other licensed code and even more open licensed code into GPLed code) and so actually blocked ZFS inclusion into the Linux kernel. But let's not start a flame war about licenses here, though it would be tempting to get into one.

In case that ZFS is already used heavily in Solaris and on other supported platforms in production environments, Oracle would be stupid to drop it in near future since that would probably scare people away from adopting their technologies even within a few years after release. Of course BTRFS is currently superior to ZFS but since it is licensed GPL it's a no-go on systems with other licenses and even Solaris. Maybe Oracle will try to dual license BTRFS but I guess it's far more probable nothing will change and there will be 2 competing but almost identical filesystems, ZFS on non-GPL OS and BTRFS on GPL OS. Dual licensing may not be possible now that it's already included into and developed with the Linux kernel.

As said, I don't want to start a flame war on licenses, so let's just stop here and note that due to some licensing issues both FS will most-likely continue to exist. :)

There are a few things Oracle could do if they want to compete with Microsoft on all fronts:

1.) Make JavaFX, Swing or even SWT (working with IBM) a real competitor for RIA and platform-independent desktop application development.
2.) Submit Java to the standardization process (ISO/ECMA?)
3.) Get a move on with new features in the Java Language (Reified Generics, Closures) so that people stop complaining about the lack of these features :)

/Daniel

Are we done for? are you joking? Is Java all you know? If your'e worried take a few weeks and switch to .Net, M$ isn't going anywhere.

As a matter of fact, I did do quite extensive .Net-work in the past... However, running mission critical applications on servers that need to be restarted for patching every couple of weeks doesn't really make me drool of excitement... and don't even get me started on the weird licensing issues like "Public Connector Licenses" and so on. C# as a language is quite nice, though :)

For now I stick to Java, Scala and Groovy :)