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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, specially because in spite of all the hate, no other company bothered to acquire Sun assets (with the exception of IBM that quickly withdrew their offer).

Without Oracle, there wouldn't exist Java 17, MaximeVM made into GraalVM, J/Rockit JIT cache as OpenJDK DSA, J/Rockit monitoring as Flight Recorder,....

And everyone could enjoy Java 6 with the JIT and GC improvements the FOSS community is known for, when there isn't some big corp sponsoring the work.

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gcc is pretty advanced compiler and, AFAIK, it’s independent from big corporations. I wouldn’t deny the possibility for Java to live under truly open source umbrella.

Almost all of GCC's development is done by employees of big corps, often as their sole job. Red Hat, IBM, etc.

looking at last 1000 commits to gcc, it seems like about 80-90% of emails are associated with "big corps". however, this doesn't tell the whole story. according to https://lwn.net/Articles/867540/, over 85% (100%-6.8%-5.0%-1.6%=86.6%) of Linux kernel changesets are supported by employers, but nobody sensible would claim that Linux is not community developed. whether it is because of historical project culture, or BDFL, or simply a large number of contributing organizations, there is clearly a substantial difference between Linux and OpenJDK development methodology.

Linux is only developed because it helps make money. Most commit as you said are by big corp to support their products, what do you expect ?

A voluntary samaritan committing yet another driver for this IBM entreprise controller, or that Facebook file system?

Linux is "community-of-big-corps"-developed.

The real challenge for Linux will be when Linus retires.

The Linux Foundation was intended act as the backstop here, but it is losing that focus, and I'm not confident that it will remain a trusted steward in the future.

For now, and to the point here, the sheer number of meaningful contributors to Linux is what differentiates it from things like Java and .NET. GCC is somewhere in the middle: less resilient than Linux, but more than Java.

Without Oracle it all could have just evaporated into public domain for other projects and interests to carry forwards. At least, that's what _should_ happen when any company folds, and when products are no longer supported by them. The entire set of copyright specifications, source code, everything should get added to the public stack of records.

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