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Comment by gst | Hacker News Reader

> Oracle has also demonstrated in court that the Java API is their intellectual property, and that they are willing to go after people for reimplementing them. OpenJDK might be blessed, but I'd still be afraid of having anything to do with their intellectual property. That's also one of the primary reasons I'm not very excited about ZFS.

If you use OpenJDK you get an implicit patent grant to run OpenJDK (as it's licensed under the GPL).

If you use any other non-OpenJDK runtime you might still violate some of Oracle's patents, but you don't get any patent grant.

So if you're concerned about patents then using OpenJDK (instead of not using it) would actually be the safer way to go.

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I think GP is pointing out that it would be far safer to not use Java in the first place. One day Oracle could decide to kill OpenJDK, and since they have a history of aggression towards non-Oracle distributions of Java you would be trapped if you depend on Java.

There are already lots of non-Oracle distributions of OpenJDK: Azul's Zulu, AdoptOpenJDK, Amazon's Corretto and I'm not aware of any aggression towards those projects. The lawsuit against Google targets an implementation that didn't derive from OpenJDK and is thus not covered by any of the patent grants.

Furthermore, OpenJDK is licensed under the GPL. Even if Oracle stopped contributing to OpenJDK the GPL license would ensure that OpenJDK and all derivative works can still be freely distributed and are still subject to Oracle's original implicit patent grant.

> There are already lots of non-Oracle distributions of OpenJDK: Azul's Zulu, AdoptOpenJDK, Amazon's Corretto and I'm not aware of any aggression towards those projects.

I don't see how that's relevant? I wasn't aware of any aggression towards Google, until Oracle suddenly decided to aggress. The fact that Oracle hasn't been aggressive towards non-Oracle OpenJDK distributions in the past doesn't mean they won't be aggressive in the future.

OpenJDK is licensed by Oracle under an open source license (and Google has made use of this license, and even internally forked OpenJDK, both during the trial and now). The court trial was over an unlicensed use of Java (Google claimed they didn't need a license because the APIs weren't Oracle's to license, but in any event, that lawsuit has absolutely nothing to do with OpenJDK).

Oh, that wasn't intended as an argument that OpenJDK is unsafe, I was just asking why it's relevant that Oracle hasn't shown aggression towards non-Oracle OpenJDK distributions yet, when nobody has brought up concerns about how Oracle already is aggressive towards OpenJDK distributions.

I can probably agree that Oracle is relatively unlikely to start coming after people for patent infringement related to using OpenJDK or forks thereof, when OpenJDK is licensed under a license with a patent grant. My biggest concern is just that Oracle seems like a thoroughly evil and unpredictable company, and I wouldn't like to use technology they own and which uses patents they own. I wouldn't have imagined that Oracle would ever come after people for re-implementing their API; I can't imagine what Oracle will do in the future, but I won't build a business or institution around the assumption that they will do nothing. It's not like there aren't a plethora of other solutions for anything developed by Oracle, most of which are better than Oracle's alternatives.

The copyright to non-Oracle OpenJDK distributions is still owned by Oracle, but Oracle licenses OpenJDK as free software (as in beer and in speech).

I think that even if it made sense to assign virtue judgments to corporations, it would be a huge stretch to claim that Oracle is any more evil than other companies of similar size, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple, but as I work for Oracle, I'm obviously biased.

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