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

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 Davlik 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.

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