Oracle Response to Apache Departure from JCP

It seems that all forces are aligning against Oracle... Good. Maybe this can serve as a signpost to others that if you lose you alignment with open source you risk losing mindshare of developers.

I wouldn't call "ASF out-voted by a landslide" a sign of Oracle's doom.

No, but if ASF had been successful in convincing other members to vote against SE7 and 8 within the Java Community they (ASF) would still be in the JCP and Oracle would be forced to deal with the community backlash on the field of use restrictions. As it is, we may be seeing a fork of the Java language which might turn out to be historic if the world moves to something new and Java whithers on the vine.

Quoting:if ASF had been successful

The ASF failed in that objective, and failed miserably. Hanging on to the Java community that could-have-been is just wishful thinking at this point. I won't say it is a reflection on the ASF in any way, but this is the reality to deal with now.

And frankly, at this point, if Java withers on the vine due to Oracle's hostility, I won't shed a tear.

Maybe it's time to bring back the Tcl browser plugins.

Apache is a big part of the Internet environment, & the ASF pulling out sends a definitive & vocal message. Absent anything else, that's big. Plus, don't forget that these governing bodies often have enough token members to prevent a political coup.

I am really missing this Java withering on the vine stuff.

Let's see -- Oracle is in trouble because one group, on losing a vote, decided to take its football and go home?

Last I looked, Java had become COBOL -- the default choice for big corporate systems. Ditto for the Oracle in the database department.

Hard to see where Oracle is hurting.

Okay, maybe I shouldn't have let so much cynicism govern my previous comment. I just doubt I'll ever do any serious development in Java. Except for some token programming exercises, it's never been on my list of "essential skills". Until Oracle's treatment of its products' communities turns around, and stays turned around, Java won't be worth consideration.

@dino, Oracle being strong in the corporate DB world does have one glimmer of light: Windows, while supported as an platform OS, doesn't exactly have a ringing endorsement from Oracle. And why should it? There's an entire OS family that can handle OraDB's workload far better than Windows. In fact, Oracle's favorite child in that family is the adopted b@$tard step-cousin.

Instead of TCL (an interpreted scripting language - or "dynamic language") it would be better to extend a truly "free" language that was designed from the get-go to run *compiled* on embedded systems as well as larger machines.

Take the "compile once - run everywhere" approach and apply it to Ada.

Ada, like COBOL, C, FORTRAN and Pascal, and UNLIKE TCL, Java, and Python, has an open specification and is not controlled by a single person or entity.

I see JavaScript becoming a serious contender in the future. Thanks to the browser wars, JavaScript engines are becoming bloody fast and it has very large mindshare (many non-programmers know it at least a bit). There are more and more applications that start to use it outside websites (KDE4, CouchDB, etcetera).