Oracle JDK is pretty much the exact same as OpenJDK and Oracle commits 98%+ of all commits to the project. It’s hard to define a market when most of it is freely available.
I beg to differ. The majority of their products are flawed and outdated. I'm not talking Oracle DB or Java but the vast amount of other apps they sell.
They bought lots of stuff, pull funding from development and redirect it to sales. Then they sell it to fit their vision; but nothing integrates cleanly and you'll be spending massive amounts of money on consultants who understand product A & B and how to connect them.
A java-dev can't do that; you need that A and B knowledge + integration skills. Those consultants are very hard to find and good effective ones nearly non-existent. The fees are enormous regardless of whether you use Oracle consultants, Oracle partners or freelancers. If you do manage to find cheaper consultants (offshoring most likely) be prepared for terrible quality as well.
Ow, and once you're finally comfortable with their stuff after spending all that money, be sure to make a reservation for the unexpected additional license fees they'll slap on you because you failed to remember the fine print.
I had the "pleasure" of working with Oracle BPMS 10 at one point. It was a piece of crap they'd acquired (but apparently a better piece of crap that the other ones available at the time that the team had evaluated). It has pretty much zero code reuse features, and the consultants had taught the team to do stuff like cram all kinds of barely-related stuff into one "screen" so parts could be "reused." Getting support for all the bugs in 10 was extremely painful. It seemed like there was one guy who know what he was doing, and the rest just repeatedly asked for more logs. BPMS 11 was a rewrite with no migration path offered (but by the time that came around I'd noped out of that team).
The team eventually re-implemented everything in Activiti before support for BPMS 10 ended. BPMS 12 might have had a migration path (IIRC, a crappy one), but by then Oracle had burned their bridges.
As someone who has done a bit of Oracle installation I disagree:
It is worse than Windows.
And no, not an Oracle employee, but actually employed by one of the Java main contributors, quite easy to find out which one, although I speak in name of the Java community unable to write proper Java on Android, while ISO C and ISO C++ are fully supported.
Also, java is one of the few languages with complete specifications, instead of saying that here is the reference implementation, what it does is the spec.
But it's not available at any price for independent implementations like Dalvik (I'm sure if it were merely a matter of money Google would've paid up). Most people who built the Java ecosystem were bait-and-switched: we were told the language would be free and the trademarks etc. were just to stop incompatible implementations, but that turned out to be false.
> Also, java is one of the few languages with complete specifications, instead of saying that here is the reference implementation, what it does is the spec.
Allegedly. Given that there are no independent published implementations (various organisations claim to have independent implementations but none of them are readily available), we should be sceptical in practice.
Then how are there plenty of independent JVMs that can legally call themselves Java?
The acquisition made a lot of sense. I was a lowly minion in Oracle when talks between SUN and IBM fell apart, and I told everyone I met "it would be great if we bought them"... After the acquisition, I expected MySQL to die a horrible death and actually it kinda survived (although barely), which I thought was somewhat magnanimous. I was hoping they would just offload some of the stuff that simply didn't make sense (Oracle selling word-processors and chat clients, really...?), but sadly some busybody repackaged them into embarrassing products. And for years they went "business as usual" for Java, actually re-igniting development in a suspiciously proactive manner, which was great... until the day the license changed.
By “that outcome”, I’m of course talking about the hatred of their business practices rather than the OpenJDK.
Worse thing for Oracle than people not paying for their JDK is people moving away from Java altogether.