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Comment by TJSomething | Hacker News Reader

My biggest concern is that there's an Enterprise Edition of GraalVM. I'm a little suspicious that the Community Edition will end up crippled and EE will cost more money than I'll ever want to spend.

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As long as the community can contribute to "uncripple" it relative to the enterprise version then there's no problem, no?

Let's play your fantasy out for a minute. Imagine I hire a large and good enough team of engineers to duplicate any feature in the enterprise edition and contribute it within a day of being released, to the community edition.

Do you believe Oracle or anyone will accept that?

Because if not, that's a clear problem.

(FWIW I strongly doubt they would be okay with this)

You still gain the benefit from having a nice faster GraalVM, and given it's open source, you could create a fork and encourage the community to use it as an alternative.

I'm sure if you were producing a much faster GraalVM, you'd soon get people to move away from Oracle's one to yours (MariaDB vs MySQL springs to mind as a comparison)

The problem here is what loophole a big company like Oracle can find, if they don't like you. They can't prevent you from doing a fork, but can easily sue you for not keeping copyright visible enough in project page README file.

Taking into account amount of resources they have, this will be enough to shut you down ;)

So what you're saying is that despite decades of existence, and repeated legal cases attempting to destroy and invalidate it... you can't trust GPLv2?

Err, you clearly did not see what happened in europe

In a perfect world we would be seeing all those nice improvements Google has brought to Java after rescuing Sun assets.

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