Exactly. The great thing about Clojure or Scala compared to other funlangs is that I can walk into just about any big "enterprise" shop and plug transparently into their codebase and toolchain. This is a crucial adoption vector for FP and the struggles other funlangs have gone through to bootstrap themselves underlines this.
> I can walk into just about any big "enterprise" shop and plug transparently into their codebase and toolchain
What is the oldest JVM Clojure can run on? Many "big enterprises" run technology that's years behind the latest and greatest. And I have been waiting for 1.7 since the time I actually wrote Java code.
What does (did?) OpenJDK give the open-source hackers anyway? A freely distributable Java to go along with your Linux distribution?
I doubt the JIT part is accessible to many developers - and those who want to adapt the JIT (= mobile hardware vendors, at this stage) could always strike a licensing deal with Oracle. There are already plenty of interpreted VM implementations, so it's not the general lack of a VM either. Sun's JVM was always freely available and downloadable, even though it sometimes contains Yahoo Toolbar.
But that's just the problem... If Oracle makes the "standard" JVM entirely proprietary, then they are under no obligation to provide it for free.
I'm sure they'll always provide a free version for desktop users, in the interests of having a wide install base. But given the pricing schemes for other Oracle products, I fully expect you'd start seeing things like per-CPU licensing for enterprises, and developer licences for the JDK.
Unless something happens, I'd be VERY surprised if the "standard" JVM is still "free to use", let alone open source, in 5 years.
That might be possible (free desktop edition, limited to 2 cores and 8GB RAM?), but I can't honestly blame Oracle for wanting to make money out of Java. Sun had the COBOL of the 21st century and still failed to make much money out of it. Oracle isn't going to make the same mistake.
they are probably going to kill Java... in a market segment where it has been chronically ill for years.
Java Enterprise is alive and healthy, thank you very much. No reason to believe that it will not continue to do pretty good for the next decade at least.
It will enter "legacy-mode". The prophecy of Java being the 21st century COBOL will be, at last, fulfilled. Old systems will be maintained and extended as long as they remain useful. New systems will be initially deployed on those platforms but, as new programmers grow less and less familiar with them and thus costlier to train, new technologies will emerge and take its place like Java took COBOL's (at least part of it).
All of this happened before, and it will happen again.
If you fork it, then you're in essence splitting these user bases, to the great detriment of both.