We’ve been chronicling what has been a rather frought six months or so for Java, ever since Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google last summer for copyright infringement in its Android software. That lawsuit has prompted a flurry of responses from Java developers (including observations from the “father of Java” James Gosling) and from the Apache Software Foundation (which resigned from the Java Executive Committee in December).
No surprise, then, this chain of events has resulted in what seems to be a shaken confidence in Java. Indeed, that seems to be the consensus from a survey taken at JavaOne last fall. The survey was meant to gauge the Java community’s thoughts on Oracle and open source.
The survey, which had over 600 respondents, asked a number of questions including this key one: under Oracle, will open source projects thrive, hang on, or die? 46% said they anticipate open source would barely hang on under Oracle’s ownership. 19% predicted that open source will die. Open source under Oracle includes not just Java, of course, but MySQL as well.
56% said they were concerned about Oracle’s lawsuit against Google, saying they felt that the lawsuit was bad for Java. 13% said they felt the lawsuit would be a good thing for Java.
The survey is not scientific to be sure. It was taken by EnterpriseDB, an open source competitor to Oracle, and taken from a group that has a clear stake in how these things shake out. Nonetheless, it certainly suggests there’s plenty of concern about Oracle’s leadership and the future of Java.
