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Oh, that wasn't intended as an argument that OpenJDK is unsafe, I was just asking why it's relevant that Oracle hasn't shown aggression towards non-Oracle OpenJDK distributions yet, when nobody has brought up concerns about how Oracle already is aggressive towards OpenJDK distributions.

I can probably agree that Oracle is relatively unlikely to start coming after people for patent infringement related to using OpenJDK or forks thereof, when OpenJDK is licensed under a license with a patent grant. My biggest concern is just that Oracle seems like a thoroughly evil and unpredictable company, and I wouldn't like to use technology they own and which uses patents they own. I wouldn't have imagined that Oracle would ever come after people for re-implementing their API; I can't imagine what Oracle will do in the future, but I won't build a business or institution around the assumption that they will do nothing. It's not like there aren't a plethora of other solutions for anything developed by Oracle, most of which are better than Oracle's alternatives.




The copyright to non-Oracle OpenJDK distributions is still owned by Oracle, but Oracle licenses OpenJDK as free software (as in beer and in speech).

I think that even if it made sense to assign virtue judgments to corporations, it would be a huge stretch to claim that Oracle is any more evil than other companies of similar size, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple, but as I work for Oracle, I'm obviously biased.




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