Oracle uses Java in its own products extensively: in fact the Oracle DB has the JVM integrated into it as a component, so they need Java to develop regardless of the details of how they do it.
Oracle can't really sabotage OpenJDK specifically. What they could do is take all development back in house. Oracle is the main contributor to OpenJDK so that'd effectively make future versions of Java closed source. However they aren't the only contributor by any means and presumably doing that would lead to a fork of the project. Red Hat contributes quite significantly already (ports, an entirely new GC engine) and I guess they'd become a rallying point. Probably a lot of Java engineers would quit and go join companies supporting OpenJDK. It'd cause a lot of disruption.
However, are they going to do that? Well, probably not. They've owned Java for years. In that time they've increased funding significantly and open sourced large new components that were not open sourced when they bought Sun. They've also sorted out Sun's management issues with the result that the project started moving again.
There's a lot of Oracle hate around due to their aggressive sales tactics and the Google lawsuit. But if you restrict your view to just the technical side of Java, they've not done a bad job. They got the project back on track, open sourced a lot of new code, they've got a solid long term technical roadmap with experienced engineers doing very professional work entirely out in the open. The design process isn't just open, it's done through the community process, so other firms have their say (see the recent Jigsaw hooha for an example). You can go take part in the design process of major new changes. Oracle's proprietary bits on top of OpenJDK are really pretty thin, I'd be surprised if they make much money from that.
Ultimately the question is, can you have something like Java without being worried about the owners? I think the answer is no. If you look at the alternative companies that might have bought Sun and continued funding Java, there'd have been maybe IBM, maybe Google, maybe Red Hat but probably not. Red Hat would have been the best but are they big and rich enough to have boosted funding to the level Oracle has? Even if Google had acquired Java, well Google has a shit ton of languages and frameworks all competing for internal attention. Whilst Google has a lot of code written in Java, it's not clear to me that Java would have won out for funding and executive attention in the battle of internal politics against Go, Dart, whatever. And of course there are lots of people who are worried about Google and the direction it's taking as well.
Oracle can't really sabotage OpenJDK specifically. What they could do is take all development back in house. Oracle is the main contributor to OpenJDK so that'd effectively make future versions of Java closed source. However they aren't the only contributor by any means and presumably doing that would lead to a fork of the project. Red Hat contributes quite significantly already (ports, an entirely new GC engine) and I guess they'd become a rallying point. Probably a lot of Java engineers would quit and go join companies supporting OpenJDK. It'd cause a lot of disruption.
However, are they going to do that? Well, probably not. They've owned Java for years. In that time they've increased funding significantly and open sourced large new components that were not open sourced when they bought Sun. They've also sorted out Sun's management issues with the result that the project started moving again.
There's a lot of Oracle hate around due to their aggressive sales tactics and the Google lawsuit. But if you restrict your view to just the technical side of Java, they've not done a bad job. They got the project back on track, open sourced a lot of new code, they've got a solid long term technical roadmap with experienced engineers doing very professional work entirely out in the open. The design process isn't just open, it's done through the community process, so other firms have their say (see the recent Jigsaw hooha for an example). You can go take part in the design process of major new changes. Oracle's proprietary bits on top of OpenJDK are really pretty thin, I'd be surprised if they make much money from that.
Ultimately the question is, can you have something like Java without being worried about the owners? I think the answer is no. If you look at the alternative companies that might have bought Sun and continued funding Java, there'd have been maybe IBM, maybe Google, maybe Red Hat but probably not. Red Hat would have been the best but are they big and rich enough to have boosted funding to the level Oracle has? Even if Google had acquired Java, well Google has a shit ton of languages and frameworks all competing for internal attention. Whilst Google has a lot of code written in Java, it's not clear to me that Java would have won out for funding and executive attention in the battle of internal politics against Go, Dart, whatever. And of course there are lots of people who are worried about Google and the direction it's taking as well.