How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

Oracle's silence about Java EE has brought developer community distrust to a fever pitch.

by Sean Gallagher

Coffee break with lots of splashes.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Oracle has quietly pulled funding and development efforts away from a community-driven technology where customers and partners have invested time and code. It all seems to be happening for no reason other than the tech isn't currently printing money.
It's a familiar pattern for open source projects that have become the property of Oracle. It started with OpenSolaris and continued with OpenOffice.org. And this time, it's happening to Java—more specifically to Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the server-side Java technology that is part of hundreds of thousands of Internet and business applications. Java EE even plays an integral role for many apps that aren't otherwise based on Java.
For months as Oracle Corporation's attorneys have battled Google in the courts over the use of Java interfaces in Android's Dalvik programming language, Oracle's Java development efforts have slowed. And in the case of Java EE, they've come to a complete halt. The outright freeze has caused concerns among companies that contribute to the Java platform and among other members of the Java community—a population that includes some of Oracle's biggest customers.

Oracle employees that worked on Java EE have told others in the community that they have been ordered to work on other things. There has also been open talk of some Java EE developers "forking" the Java platform, breaking off with their own implementation and abandoning compatibility with the 20-year-old software platform acquired by Oracle with the takeover of Sun Microsystems six years ago. Yet Oracle remains silent about its plans for Java EE even as members of the governing body overseeing the Java standard have demanded a statement from the company.

"It's a dangerous game they're playing," Geir Magnusson, an independently elected member of the Java Community Process Executive Committee, told Ars. "It's amazing—there's a company here that's making us miss Sun."

Magnusson says trying to decipher Oracle's motives is like "Kremlinology" because of the opacity of the company's decision-making process. But based on conversations with people intimate with Oracle's internal Java development operations, the mechanics of what's happened so far are familiar to any long-time watcher of Chairman Larry Ellison. And as the company fought in court with Google, Oracle executives had already defunded and gutted teams working on Java EE.

The absence of any official comment from Oracle has led some within the Java community to question Oracle's commitment not just to Java EE, but to the whole Java platform as well. A group called the Java EE Guardians is now staging a public relations and petition drive seeking to pressure Oracle into either restarting development on Java EE or setting it free. But the odds are slim that Oracle would part with even a sliver of the intellectual property of Java, particularly as the company prepares to appeal Google's victory in court.

Reza Rahman, a former Java evangelist for Oracle that left the company in March, now acts as a spokesman for the Java EE Guardians. "The only response we've had so far has been Java EE specification leads telling us they are unable to move their work forward," he told Ars. "They have not told us what they are working on instead."

Rahman believes that if Oracle continues to neglect Java EE, "the short and long term risks for the [Java] community and industry are immense. Java and Java EE are pervasive technologies much of global IT depends upon." The Java ecosystem built over the past 20 years, with its open standards supported by multiple vendors, "powers so much of what we owe our livelihoods to," he explained. Without continued investment and stewardship, Rahman believes "every part of the Java ecosystem will become weakened over time, as will global IT, at least in the short term."

While reporting this story, Ars attempted to speak to dozens of current and former Oracle employees familiar with the company's Java development efforts. We also reached out to a number of Oracle customers about the slowdown. None would speak on the record, in many cases out of fear of legal recourse from Oracle.

Naturally, Ars also contacted Oracle's media relations team on several occasions. We were met with dead silence on the topic of Java—messages were taken by assistants, voice messages and e-mails went unanswered. When we contacted one Oracle official directly with a request to at least comment on the background about the platform, the person at least replied curtly: "Sorry, no."

Java developer nightmare #4

Oracle's mercenary nature has become an easy target for jokes. At the 2015 JavaOne conference in San Francisco, former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy appeared in a video celebrating the 20^th anniversary of Java and delivered a satirical "Top 12 Java Developer Nightmares" countdown. "Number #4: You love open source software and sharing, but you work at Oracle."

The line got a big laugh from an audience of Java developers, but it was one of recognition. Given Oracle's track record with open source projects—more specifically, the trail of dead or forked projects the company has left in its wake—there has been ample reason for concern about Java. Shortly after JavaOne, Oracle only heightened developer worry.  Work essentially stopped on the next enterprise edition of Java, and the schedule for the next core release—Java SE 9—was pushed back to 2017.

Former Sun Microsystems Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy delivers the bad news to Java developers at October's JavaOne.

Oracle has been cast in the villain's role for a long time—particularly since the company acquired Sun Microsystems and gained ownership of Sun's wide-spanning collection of open source software. From the moment that deal was announced, many feared Sun's developer-focused open source love affair would perish in favor of Oracle's vendor lock-in preference. Many in Sun's internal open source force, such as XML standard co-creator Tim Bray, jumped ship before the ink on the deal was dry.

The fears turned out to be well-founded. Oracle wasted little time before drowning Sun's open source darlings, ceasing development of the OpenSolaris operating system quickly. Over the next three years, Oracle unleashed a series of maneuvers that were either intended to euthanize open source projects the company couldn't figure out how to monetize or to snatch projects back from the open source community:

	A brief history of Oracle and open source
December 2009	MySQL creator Ulf Michael "Monty" Widenius launches petition campaign to ask European Community regulators to block Oracle's acquisition of Sun a year after Sun acquired MySQL. Widenius predicts Oracle will make parts of MySQL closed-source if the deal is approved.
January 2010	Oracle completes acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
February 2010	Oracle excludes OpenSolaris from product roadmap.
March 2010	Simon Phipps, Open Source Officer, leaves Sun/Oracle.
April 2010	James Gosling, father of Java, leaves Oracle. He later calls the company "ethically challenged."
August 2010	Oracle memo tells employees OpenSolaris will be discontinued, Solaris and ZFS to be "closed." OpenSolaris Governing Board dissolves. Illumos "fully open" fork of OpenSolaris, ZFS launches. Multiple members of MySQL team leave to go to Rackspace, join development project for Drizzle fork of MySQL.
September 2010	OpenOffice.org community members, made nervous by OpenSolaris developments and by reduction in Oracle developers dedicated to OpenOffice.org, form The Document Foundation. They create a LibreOffice "fork" to be free of Oracle-owned trademark. They invite Oracle to become a member.
October 2010	Oracle demands members of The Document Foundation leave the OpenOffice.org project due to "conflict of interest," and the company refuses to join the group. LibreOffice officially becomes a fork instead of a placeholder. Oracle takes the HPC platform formerly known as Sun Grid Engine closed-source, and it turns over the open source maintenance to the Open Grid Scheduler project. (Four months later, the whole Grid team leaves to join Univa.)
December 2010	Apache Foundation resigns from the executive board of Java Community Process after Oracle denies Apache a Technology Compatibility Kit license for its Apache Harmony open source implementation of Java.
January 2011	Oracle trademarks "Hudson," the name of an open source Java continuous integration server platform (community votes to rename the project "Jenkins"). Oracle continues development of the project on its own as "Hudson."
April 2011	Oracle kills development of OpenOffice.org and OracleOpenOffice. Two months later, the company donates code to Apache.
September 2011	Oracle announces that it will release proprietary extensions to MySQL and that the project will no longer be fully open source, moving to "open core" model.
June 2013	Oracle changes the license on an open source version of Berkeley DB from a BSD-style public license to the Affero General Public License, which requires users to provide source of their applications to anyone who connects to them over a network and to apply a GPL v. 3 or AGPL license to their code. The move is seen widely as either a scare tactic to get customers to buy the commercial license for custom applications or as a death-blow to Berkeley DB.