It's pretty obvious that Oracle has been milking the government for decades. Those contracts and license fees that they get are just free money from taxpayers. Does any software developer still use Oracle products? Even Java started to lose momentum after Oracle acquired it.
I'm still enraged over the fact that Oracle got $300 million to make a website for Oregon's healthcare and failed. The website wasn't ready (nor would it ever be ready), and the whole state's healthcare was in tatters when the ACA came into effect. Oregon had to scramble to hire thousands of temporary staff and start processing paper forms to keep things running.
Oregon sued and ended up settling ostensibly for $100 million, but in actuality, it was $60 million in "customer service" and $25 million in legal fees.
Obviously, Oregon's government is culpable as well, but it's another data point to suggest Oracle is a dodgy sales/legal company posing as an engineering company.
Uh, I would argue Java had already lost momentum before the acquisition. Java 6 was released in 2006 and then stagnated; Sun had pushed a new version every two years since 1998, but 2008 came and went without a new Java.
Oracle bought Sun in the first half of 2009, completing in 2010. They actually moved to release Java 7 pretty quickly after that, there was a flurry of activity - mostly meant to reassure the ecosystem about their commitment to the platform, I think. After Java 8, new additions like lambdas seemed to have somewhat rebooted the scene. The ecosystem looks more lively now than 10 years ago, in many ways. It’s definitely a better language to work with, it feels rather less “enterprise” than before.
The move to monetize the JDK is annoying but almost understandable as a compromise between the renewed push to evolve the JDK (with yearly releases) and Oracle’s inclination to spend as little as possible on support. They don’t care if some of that support activity ends up generating money for others (via alternative JDKs), they just don’t want to be on the hook for it.
I’m hardly a fan of Oracle (the cloud move is such a fraud), but to be honest I think their Java strategy does make sense. It certainly makes more sense than Sun’s.
>Even Java started to lose momentum after Oracle acquired it.
I sometimes wonder how much would it take to buy back Java from Oracle. Basically to buy back the Trademark, TCK and the official stewardship. ( Although I have to admit they are doing a pretty good job so far with Java )
