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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

Another reason to avoid:

Oracle owns Java.

This automatically puts Java on my list of tools I'd prefer to avoid for new serious projects. (Legacy projects; if it's working and it isn't an issue yet, maintenance.)

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Use OpenJDK!

Never touch anything from Oracle.

Then you will be fine.

Oracle is the company that wants you to buy a license for your MariaDB(!) instance running on a small AWS instance! Yep, that happened.

Source: have worked with Java for years, three of those around Oracle products.

> Use OpenJDK! Never touch anything from Oracle.

But OpenJDK is Oracle's. They are the primary contributors to the project, and they really made it 100% open-source.

Despite Oracle being the primary contributors, there are other big companies (IBM, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) [1] supporting OpenJDK. And this are only the big companies, there are so much medium/little companies just using Java as a language without actively sponsoring/supporting the OpenJDK project. IMHO, there is no possible way that the OpenJDK (and Java) arent going to be enhanced further for many many years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Collaboration_with_IBM...

I know, I just wanted to point out that you cannot use OpenJDK and at the same time not use anything from Oracle.

It is not a big deal as long as it’s still run as independent project. There are plenty of other big players interested in keeping reference implementation vendor-neutral.

You can use any other fork/build like AdoptOpenJDK or any other. It is open-source like Linux Kernel...

You can use AdoptOpenJDK or Azul or whatever, but you will be using code largely from Oracle. I don't think there is any problem with that, but the OP said "never touch anything from Oracle".

Java is not only driven by Oracle, there are even independent JVMs. And then, there is OpenJDK, which is supported by many different big companies (Oracle, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) [1] As long as you are just _using_ the JDK, I see no problem regarding that Oracle may sue you. And besides that, I see no problems about Oracle _owning_ Java (idk if you really can say that Oracle _owns_ Java, I mean OpenJDK is open-source and free).

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