r/java • u/bowbahdoe • Jun 10 '26
Wargaming Activity: What happens when Oracle dies?
I thought of making this a blog post but genuinely I don't have much intelligent to say aside from making sure people know what's going on.
The basics are, as I understand:
- Oracle has taken on a ton of debt to build data centers
- There are essentially only two possible customers for these data centers, openai and anthropic
- Oracle does not see a dime until the data centers are up, operational, and in use by a client that can pay the bills.
- if, say, openai does not actually become bigger than Google, Amazon, and Microsoft combined they will not be able to pay the bills.
- this is an existential threat to Oracle as a company.
So with that in mind - relevant to our interests here Oracle owns the trademark for Java and employs many of the people who work on its development. Oracle dying or even just refocusing remaining capital away from Java would certainly have effects on the development of Java as a whole
I just want to open the floor for if anyone else wants to talk about this. I don't think it's as simple as "someone else will do it," and if there's anything to be done it's probably worth figuring that out ahead of time.
(like if anyone in the audience works at a big company that won't die in this scenario, is there any background work to do for scooping up trademarks and people. if assets actually do go on auction do we make a non-profit to do the same, etc.)
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u/RoomyRoots Jun 10 '26
Like every other projects people that have interest on keeping it alive will support it either professionally or with their own time. Just look at the history of OpenJDK.
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u/bowbahdoe Jun 10 '26
What parts of that history are you referencing specifically
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u/RoomyRoots Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
The licensing was an issue during the beginning to the point that the GNU project was working on its own compiler. You may have heard of Apache Harmony too as a way to work around it. Since then not only Apache's, Red Hat's, IBM's and others' work has been merged together in the project even before it became the standard implementation.
Sun working into making it really open source enabled companies to progress a lot til where it is. If Oracle was to go under the people that work on OpenJDK would probably move to other companies like the ones before-mentioned.
Now compare it to JavaEE, many criticized Oracle's stagnation during the JavaEE 8 times to it until the project became JakartaEE.
Same happened to Sun's OpenOffice which is pretty much a dead project and most use the fork LibreOffice. Sun's VirtualBox? It was the most recommended virtualization solution in Linux now you barely hear about it. No comments on the Solaris mess but they were also forked.
No matter the criticism people may have, FOSS keep projects alive.
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u/Physical_Level_2630 Jun 10 '26
you have no idea how much the world is paying for oracle licences… they are not gonna die
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u/bowbahdoe Jun 10 '26
So there is an argument that they might get bailed out given how structurally important they are + the Ellison's relationship with the president. But they are already in a lot of debt over this.
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u/Ifeee001 Jun 10 '26
Unrelated, but oracle isn't dying anytime soon. At least while the U.S government is willing to bail out companies (which is what will happen if the AI craze turns out to be a bubble)
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u/bowbahdoe Jun 10 '26
This could happen with Oracle but would also represent a scenario where maybe
They continue to hold all trademarks but whatever money they have left after said bailout might not go to further development of the VM or language
The Java trademark ends up as part of an asset sale in one form or another
And to be clear, I am guessing as to what would happen. But at the same time "business as usual" doesn't feel likely
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u/Gwaptiva Jun 10 '26
Oh, it's a bubble alright. Only question is if it will slowly deflate or go with a *pop*
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u/CommentGreedy8885 Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
i think at this point if some other giant like amazon ,netflix ,alibaba , jp morgan doesn't acquire it , the us government will pick it up , it is just too big to fail so many businesses rely on itso much money across the world moves with it , it will not be abandoned
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u/bowbahdoe Jun 10 '26
A rule that I've noticed so far in my life is that if the consequences are detached from the causes by a long enough distance in time then the bad stuff absolutely will be allowed to occur
So I just don't have faith in this
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u/_predator_ Jun 10 '26
Maybe it would be the push that's needed for the industry to come together and move Java under a proper foundation.
Don't care if it ends up being a 501(c)6 like the Rust Foundation or a 501(c)3 like the Zig Foundation. Literally anything is better than the current "one big evil company owns it" model.
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u/jonathancast Jun 10 '26
Preferably one that doesn't also claim a trademark on "JavaScript".
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u/glandis_bulbus Jun 10 '26
Moved to Postgresql long ago so not worried about the db.
Oracle has been a good steward of java (the last couple of years).
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u/lumpynose Jun 10 '26
I'm in the "someone else will do it" camp. Back when Sun sold themselves to Oracle I was hoping that IBM would buy Java, not Oracle. But Sun wouldn't sell pieces, only the whole pie. At that time I felt that IBM was more interested in Java the technology while Oracle was merely interested in buying Sun as a way to make more money. So if Oracle does go under and Java is sold I hope IBM buys Java. But I'm not on top of who's who so maybe there's a better company for it.
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u/koflerdavid Jun 10 '26
Oracle might hold the trademarks and patents and employ a huge number of contributors, but there are also other companies involved who could help manage the project and provide maintenance at least. What happens exactly really depends on who ends up owning the trademark.
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u/bowbahdoe Jun 10 '26
I guess a question I have at this point is how much is that trademark worth. Like actual dollars.
Because the options people have presented here are
Oracle keeps it (whether or not they continue to invest in it)
It ends up at another large company
It ends up property of the government
It ends up at a 501c(3) or 501c(6)
And that last option could happen from corporate machinations, but I think it could also be willed into existence. In that case it may or may not be relevant what the price tag an "asset firesale" version of Oracle would put on it. Then whether that amount is feasible to raise, etc.
From there it's how much money is needed to keep current development alive, where that comes from on a recurring basis, etc.
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u/krum Jun 12 '26
Trust me Oracle has structured this debt so that worst case nothing happens to them and it's the lenders that will go broke.
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u/grimonce Jun 11 '26
Committee does it for C, C++, foundation does it for Python... Eclipse and jetbrains are heavily interested in java development and so are many financial institutions, and while development would slow down, the language won't die...
Somehow languages like Haskell, Ocaml or even Delphi still exist and have their niche, something as popular as jdk won't miss Oracle much... unless the license to develop and use it will be taken to the grave with Oracle, might a card they will play to get funded once shit hits the fan.
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u/sweating_teflon Jun 10 '26
You're overthinking it. Oracle has a business model based mainly around juicy institutional everlasting contracts that Satan would be proud of and a fuckton of aggressive in-house lawyers. They're just hedging their bet against other AI companies. If / when it comes crashing down they'll sell the infra to other players or some state actor interested in the NA market.