Because the history of tech and business is "stagnation kills"? I cannot envision a mindset where "we exist because we can't be excised from decades-old businesses" is a desirable place for Java and the JVM to be. If Oracle thinks they can grow the JVM off of stagnant customers who can't afford to move, they're nuts. If they think forward-looking customers are going to settle when competitors are getting better, faster around them, they're also nuts.
I want healthy competition, and so yeah, my jimmies are rustled when they're making bad decisions because even if I exit the JVM ecosystem for my own purposes, one of the major players being too afraid of their own customers to fix a central rot of their product is bad for us all.
The issue is whether it's actually "central rot" or not. That's not an objective statement. It depends on your point of view. If you're putting your customers first, you have to look at if from their point of view.
Startup thinking is that you never have enough users, so you have to appeal to a lot of new users or you die. Companies selling consumer products are similar - you have to convince a lot of new customers every year. But that's not where Java is. It's going to last as long as COBOL and Fortran and C++. Making small, careful changes and paying attention to migration costs so you don't leave people behind will work fine.
For a business with many large, satisfied, long term customers, the software can survive as long as they're willing to pay maintenance. The userbase may slowly fade, but the customers they have aren't going to be too quick to move if things are working. If anything, disruptive changes will make them move away faster since they're forced to do something, so why not do a rewrite that's bigger impact?
Making migration easy is not "stagnant", it's good customer service, allowing old code to be modernized a bit. If you know the real cost of upgrades, a more dramatic change may not be worth it.
And for those of us doing new projects, well, there are a lot of other shiny toys to play with. We don't have to disrupt everything.
Because the history of tech and business is "stagnation kills"? I cannot envision a mindset where "we exist because we can't be excised from decades-old businesses" is a desirable place for Java and the JVM to be. If Oracle thinks they can grow the JVM off of stagnant customers who can't afford to move, they're nuts. If they think forward-looking customers are going to settle when competitors are getting better, faster around them, they're also nuts.
I want healthy competition, and so yeah, my jimmies are rustled when they're making bad decisions because even if I exit the JVM ecosystem for my own purposes, one of the major players being too afraid of their own customers to fix a central rot of their product is bad for us all.