Cromoteca

The news that Oracle has acquired Sun has been like an earthquake for my development attitude. I have a long relationship with Java, I was having my first development experiences at college with FORTRAN 77 when Java 1.0 was published. It was an exciting new piece of software that tought me OO programming and let me play with fun things like image retouching.

Java helped me in a lot of situations: while in every field you can find something better, Java can do them all at a good level: desktop apps, web apps, web client apps... all with a single language, IDE and platform.

When Java became open source I was extremely happy, although it was clear that it was some sort of desperate move. Finally Java would have been included in Linux distros and would have been rewarded as an open source dev tool. It happened to some extent, but now things look different. Yes, OpenJDK is there and nobody can cancel it, but I don't think that Oracle will play nicely with the open source community. Many experts are saying that the acquisition is a good thing since Oracle knows how to do business, and Java might gain power from that, but I don't care if they make money or not, I just care about my small world, and I'm sure that the same applies to many other developers and companies.

The Black Hole Sun song by Soundgarden is sticking in my head. Does it make sense to keep developing MeshCMS in Java? Is the (few) time I'm spending on MeshCMS 4 well invested? Who knows. At work I use C# and ASP.NET, and now I can't see such a difference between C# and Java. The former is a toy owned by Microsoft, while the latter is a toy owned by Oracle. That's my feeling.

Unfortunately, we'll need some months at least to know what will happen to Java as a community tool. Maybe it's better to stay with a language that is open source by design, like Python or Ruby.

LS

May 6, 2009 11:48 PM