Negotiations failed: how Oracle killed java ee

Today (May 3), the Eclipse Foundation president Mike Milinkovic wrote in his blog about the final results of the closed-door negotiations between the Oracle and the Eclipse Foundation on the trademark. As we remember, Oracle announced that it was opening Java EE source code for this organization, so the framework would be open source “for real”. After 18 months of intensive negotiations, all efforts came to an end: negotiations failed. There will be no trademark agreement.

In simple words, the reason, according to the minutes of the board of directors, is that Oracle instead put forward a number of unacceptable conditions. Some of them put at serious risk the very existence of the Eclipse Foundation. Oracle demanded that products distributed by the Eclipse Foundation (such as the Eclipse IDE) be staffed with JRE certified only Oracle or its licensees – no certificates from other vendors or uncertified runtime environments. Therefore, both IDE and GlassFish would no longer be vendor-independent. And this restriction was not announced at the beginning of the negotiations, it was announced much later, when the transfer of the code had already begun. It can be assumed that this was a reaction to the transfer of the OpenJ9 JVM from IBM, which is a direct threat to the Oracle business. But, as soon as Eclipse products ceased to be vendor-independent, this could lead to the abolition of tax incentives for the Eclipse Foundation, which would mean a financial fiasco and, possibly, would mean the end of the organization as a whole. Therefore, it was not easy unacceptablewas just is impossible agrees with the terms of Oracle, so that the negotiations in one way or another completely failed.

All that remains is no more and no less than the end of Java EE. Eclipse Foundation can use rather outdated code. without modification right. If it is modified, it must be renamed – as a project name (like JAX-RS, which is not very cool, but acceptable), and package name (like javax. *), this means that existing applications will not work on the updated platform without recompiling after intensive refactoring. Consequently, it will be a completely new, incompatible platform, the worst possible option, since not only the “WORA” (Write Once Run Anywhere) principle is violated, but in reality this simply will not happen: after 18 months, almost no application vendor wants to spend time and money supplying new reassembled versions to all customers in the name of supporting the renamed platform with a dubious future. The future is unclear because Oracle has already begun a policy of blocking the decisions of the board of directors of the Eclipse Foundation, in which Oracle has a representative who needs to unanimous decision. Oracle has the power and it looks like it will use this power to block the future of the Eclipse Foundation. The company has already demonstrated this on the board of directors, where it blocked the decision with a single vote, which otherwise would have been unanimous.

The current response of the Eclipse Foundation is to demonstrate success and save at least some of the values ​​that were advertised as part of the Jakarta brand campaign. But at what cost? Why keep the trademark of what has become an empty skeleton? Now it is no longer a successor of Java EE as a global standard, it’s just some kind of framework done by some organization and users will soon understand and draw conclusions. At the moment, plans are focused on renaming everything as soon as possible. But who really jumps on this train if it causes changes in all existing applications? Mike Milinkovic from Eclipse still sees a bright future ahead. For me, a glass is not half full: today it has fallen apart. This is the day that Oracle killed Java EE.

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