The GPL however isn't theirs.
Let's be grateful they haven't done so yet. I'm not convinced there is sufficient talent to carry on OpenJDK without Oracle (contrary to the OpenSolaris→illumos situation).
Why? Wouldn't the community come together and implement any features Oracle tries to lock away in their proprietary version?
Surprised that Java is in the same position.
In 2021, corporate Open Source is often just a response to the market pressure of genuine FOSS. If there's no community-based product, then users are always at the whim of the dominant company, and they can choose to leverage that dominance at any time.
The same people who believe Linux will take over Windows on Desktop for 20 years. I am still surprised human dont learn much from history.
All non-android JVMs depend heavily on OpenJDK.
To put it another way, I'm sure the Kotlin community is big enough to continue developing/maintaining their own JVM implementation (or just use the Android one). I don't think the Java community (that is, people who contribute to open source Java code; not just enterprises that use Java) is big enough to continue development of the Java language.
The only natural candidates I can think of would be Google or Eclipse Foundation. I don’t see Google picking up development as very likely given their legal history with Oracle, and I think Eclipse Foundation would very quickly become stretched unless organisations like IBM are able to lend money and developers.
That being said, I think one of the more exciting futures for Java involves Eclipse taking a leading role in the development of the language and the reference JDK. I view them as the most important non-profit working in the Java ecosystem, and they are already stewards of Jakarta EE.
The "community" is underpinned by corporations. If you look at the top trendy languages they're generally created or heavily supported by large corporations.
It's not all about the music, man.
Unfortunately they do not for the most part. Obviously there are exceptions but they are fairly rare.
Actions speak loudly.
Plus there's GraalVM. Graal and OpenJDK are actually totally separate teams inside Oracle, who compete with each other! They have different licensing, versioning etc models too. And they've written an entire JIT compiler from scratch, which other firms are also developing expertise in (Twitter, Spotify). So even if OpenJDK changed a lot, that wouldn't necessarily imply Graal would change too.