Minimal skills

Vincent DEFERT 20.100 at defert.com
Mon Jun 8 07:58:04 UTC 2020


On 07/06/2020 19:26, galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu wrote:
>
> This is just general thought not addressed to anyone in particular.
>
> For the moment it indeed is true that openjdk is free. While Sun Microsystems was behind Java I was quite certain there will be no changes neither for end user use of Java, not for openjdk. Sun Microsystem did have that reputation (at least, in my book). Oracle has different reputation (again, in my book). And charging end users of java applications was not a surprise for me. I am not saying openjdk will have the same faith, but if that happens, it will not come as a surprise for me.
>
> Now, it is everybody?s own judgement people should rely on in estimate of how useful their skills in programming in Java may be in some future to come. They still may be valuable even if you shift your field out of open source domain, so do your own thinking.
>
> Just my 2 cents, as always.
>

Valeri, no offence intended, but you obviously don't know much about Java.

Yes, when Oracle acquired Sun they didn't know how to deal with open 
source, so they had to learn it with OpenOffice and MySQL... ;)

With Java they do exactly the opposite: they take care of it.
Java hasn't been much used to create desktop applications: they dropped 
JavaFX.
J2EE had its time but was not suited for REST services development: they 
dropped it.
They also added features to comfort Java's position in the language 
fashion show (e.g. REPL, stream API).
They kind of prune and fertilize their rose bush so it can grow 
harmoniously.

Of course, there's a reason for these efforts: Java is mostly used to 
develop enterprise applications, and the corporate world is Oracle's 
natural ecosystem.
Understand: they know how to make money there, that's what they've 
always been doing.
Conversely, OpenOffice and MySQL were consumer software in a market 
dominated by Microsoft, no wonder they didn't care much about them.

Now, concerning the Java developers community, you also may not know how 
deep the open source spirit is rooted there.
There are cultural reasons for this, one of them being that Windows was, 
and still is, the worse platform to run Java applications on.
So Java developers also have to use some kind of Unix system when 
deploying their applications.
It is also worth noting a great many Java tools are released under the 
Apache license, which is close to the BSD license.
And you may be surprised if you had a look at the wealth of Java open 
source tools available (e.g. google "Maven repository").


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