An Unexpected Pleasure

“Today’s announcement that IBM is going to join forces and work
with Oracle on OpenJDK is good news for Java, and by extension for
Eclipse. All of us who live within the Java ecosystem need to
recognize that this fundamentally strengthens the platform,
enhances the business value of Java and offers the hope of an
increased pace of innovation.

“Although it will take a while for all of the ramifications and
reactions to become clear, at its face the announcement challenges
the conventional wisdom that the future of Java is going to be a
fractured one. Some recent examples of these expectations can be
seen in blog posts like James Governor’s “Java: The Unipolar
Moment, On distributed governance for distributed software” and
Joseph Ottinger’s “The Future of Java: forking, death, or stasis”.
When I read them just a short time ago, I thought they accurately
reflected the likeliest outcomes for Java’s sure-to-be fractious
future. Now I am much more optimistic that we can get back to
innovation.

“To me the overarching motivation is obvious. Both IBM and
Oracle have a shared interest in assuring their enterprise
customers that Java was, is and always will be the safe technology
choice that they’ve been selling for the past ten to fifteen
years.”

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