Oracle, Java, and SageTV

[Taddeusz]

With the last announcement from Oracle saying that they are going to have a premium paid version of the JVM I'm Kind of curious what SageTV's stance is on Java going forward with Oracle at the helm?

[Nelbert]

It was a no brainer Oracle is going to milk anyone it can from the IP it gained buying Sun. Anything that won't create income they shutdown or disown. I personally like the Sun kit and software and it's sad to see it go but the reality is Oracle makes money, Sun didn't.

I guess for SageTV it will depend on what benefits if any the paid version gives over the free.

Taking Redhat JBoss, Ubuntu and Mysql as an example, there are free versions and paid for versions. The paid versions are usually the enterprise versions and backed by provider support, enterprise level testing, guarenteed fixes etc, and generally a version behind. For something like Jboss, the paid version get's you hotfixes specific to your implementation of Jboss and applications running in it if necessary.

Oracle has stated they'll continue a high performance free JVM, if they didn't the last opensource version would be forked and yet another JVM created. The royalty battles with google, and spat with Apache are down to patent infringments on Java ME which don't affect use of the desktop/server JVM.

On the flip side Oracle owns BerkleyDB, which is most likely installed on just about every linux box under the sun, and that has remained opensource.