Oracle Lays Off Java Mission Control Team After Open Sourcing Product (infoq.com) 65
Kesha Williams, reporting for InfoQ (shared by numerous readers): The Java Mission Control suite of tools, also known as JMC, was open sourced by Oracle on May 3rd to much applause and excitement from the Java development community. The excitement was replaced with unease as sources reported that the entire JMC development team had been laid off. JMC is a well-known profiling and diagnostics tools suite for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) primarily targeting systems running in production. It is used by developers to gather detailed low-level information about how the JVM and the Java application are behaving. The official open source announcement came on May 5th from Marcus Hirt, a member of the Java Platform Group at Oracle. "Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who helped open source Java Mission Control in the relatively short period of time it was done in." According to Hirt, the intent behind open sourcing JMC was to provide the community with the opportunity to add new features and capabilities to the tools suite.
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Actually it's Oracle, not Open Source which is the cancer. Oracle just doesn't get how Open Source works, so they confuse it with their trash can.
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Stock price is meaningless. There are lucky morons who succeed, and geniuses who fail. Having a shitload of heavy handed sales soldiers to get profits up has nothing whatsoever to do with open source strategies. Oracle is a big company, so this suite of Java tools isn't even a bullet point to the Oracle executives and the decision to dump them was undoubtedly made at a middle management level.
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Yeah, but at least these developers will be able to continue their development work. They just won't be getting paid for it anymore.
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Yeah, but at least these developers will be able to continue their development work. They just won't be getting paid for it anymore.
It would be quite amusing to now see Oracle apply for some H-1Bs for "Java Internals Core Developers" . . .
. . . claiming that they can't find any US folks for the jobs.
I'm guessing that the Java Mission Control team somehow pissed off Larry Ellison . . . a very dangerous thing to do . . .
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I for one would simply point out that it took this event to be able to link open source to "massive layoffs". Perhaps this is the only ways Oracle would ever do this. Regardless, it is done.
I'm sure these find Java experts will find their way.
An opportunity missed (Score:5, Insightful)
This is precisely the kind of product that benefits greatly from corporation / open-source collaboration. A community-centric tool that benefits with having both close ties to the official codebase, and also has a broad population of interested persons providing input, feedback, bugfixes, etc.
Oracle has bungled, and continues to bungle, both open-source in general, and Java in particular. Despite a 2016 bubble, the long-term decline in popularity of the platform is significant.
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the long-term decline in popularity of the platform is significant.
Which decline are you talking about? And which bubble?
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The overall Java decline since at least 2002, aside from the 2015/2016 bubble
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in... [tiobe.com]
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On tiobe ... Any links for enterprise usage?
No idea what troll like you want to gain with nonsense like this.
Re:An opportunity missed (Score:5, Informative)
You asked for a source, I showed you a source that showed Java popularity at about half of what it once was.
I don't have enterprise-specific numbers, but in 2018, the Java job demand is down about 9%
https://www.codingdojo.com/blo... [codingdojo.com]
Fewer people are looking for tutorials and information as compared to a year ago
http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.htm... [github.io]
Between 2013 and 2017 Java has seen a 4% decline in popularity
https://insights.stackoverflow... [stackoverflow.com]
You can call me a troll all you want, but Java has been in decline for a very long time. I'm sure there are areas where it will continue to be viable for the foreseeable future, but to pretend that it's as strong as it was back in it's heyday is just deluding yourself.
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Ah, you are talking about the united states never mind.
I was more thinking about world wide usage.
but to pretend that it's as strong as it was back in it's heyday is just deluding yourself.
It is stronger than ever, but perhaps things like Kotlin, Scala, Groovy are not "Java" for you.
Re:An opportunity missed (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's not compiled in a Java compiler, then it's not Java. Languages like Kotlin and Scala exist PRECISELY because of Oracle's mistreatment/neglect of Java.
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Java's a language based on old programming paradigms
Like every language we use our days, there was not a new paradigm since 20 or 30 years,
and it's core purpose for existing (WORA) is gone
It is not.
as a result of Linux owning the datacenter and containerization. .NET language, nor in C++, nor in PHP nor in Perl, but in: Java. Or a language running on the JVM.
Yeah, and most software runing on linux in data centers is not written in a
I'm relatively well connected to the startup community and I know of exac
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Kotlin and Scala were created long before Oracle bought Sun.
Regardless what compiler compiles them, they run on the Java JVM and use the Java Ecosystem like http://apache.org/ [apache.org] and maven central: https://mvnrepository.com/repo... [mvnrepository.com]
Who ever modded you up is an idiot.
Java is the biggest software ecosystem on the planet, regardless what "language" you use to program for it. A +/- 2% or 4% this year or that year in job search engines or tiobe does not change that. And the next 30 yeas it most likely wont change an
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"Kotlin and Scala were created long before Oracle bought Sun."
Oracle bought Java in January 27, 2010, Kotlin first appeared in 2011
And while Scala had existed before Oracle bought Java, it was designed precisely to deal with the design issues that Java had, and was barely a blip on the radar until 2014, when Oracle finally included lambda expressions in the JVM (three years after C++, and seven years after .NET)
I'm a developer. I care far more about the language that I'm using, how it's supported, and what
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Do you mean this Kotlin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ?
I used it significantly before 2011.
Scala was not developed to "fix" any "shortcomings" or "design issues" of Java. It was developed because the inventor is a language freak. The same guy who developed the Java 1.4/Pizza compiler: Martin Odersky.
but the JVM is far too slow for any of the kind of work that I do these days.
That is ridicules.
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JetBrains started development of the language in 2010 because they were tired of how old-fashioned Java was. Here's a Wired article about it:
https://www.wired.com/story/ko... [wired.com]
Go back to that Kotlin Wikipedia page you cited: it first appeared publicly in 2011
And no, it's not ridiculous the the JVM is too slow for what I do. I do machine learning, virtual & augmented reality development, modeling & simulation / game development, and embedded systems. While you can use Java for game development, it's no
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Java is as good for NNs as C++ ... there is no speed difference. A problem could be discrepancies in the floating point formats, however.
I guess you are simply happy with the tools you use and did not use Java since decades and hence have no idea how it behaves now.
Anyway, I never used Applets ...
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Another company with greater interest in the product can pay developers to work on the product; otherwise the product is not very useful and not worth paying a development team (so dies), or is simply so useful that an army of developers with interest in the product will each pass only incidental code changes into it and still drive further development.
In the latter case, if Oracle tries to control the product, someone will read Robert's Rules and then set up their own organization to manage the forked g
So now I know... (Score:4, Interesting)
...why about 1/3 of the Stockholm dev office was suddenly empty this week. And I had to come here to find out about it. Wow.
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Seriously, I'm sorry you had to find out this way
I don't get it (Score:2)
On one hand "LETS SUE THE PANTS OFF OF GOOGLE BECAUSE JAVA!", and on the other they're pushing Java into the hands of the community.
I wanna develop something used by billions of devices, not care about it, and sue anybody that tries to copy the idea I don't give a rats ass about.
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Short-term greed made them shoot their own Java foot, but that's how Oracle has always been and it at least got them "big" such that they won't fix habits that seem to usually work. But in their heyday they didn't have to deal much with OSS issues such that their big fat Greek lawyer approach may be obsolete. (Okay, they're not Greek.)
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Oracle acquired Sun/Java for two reasons
1) People still cared about Sun at the time and it was a popular platform for running their database.
2) Java - they never gave a darn about developing further. They saw it as the next COBOL something that critical stuff was written in that would likely live on for decades. Just minimally supporting it would ensure a continuing lucrative revenue stream for years to come with no effort. Bonus points if they could con the "community" into doing a good deal of the work
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And then proceeded to piss off the owners of Sun hardware by locking down the system updates and stuff which had been free since forever and announced that if you didn't have a maintenance contract with Oracle you got nothing. Which, I'm sure, accelerated people moving to anything but Sun/Oracle.
I know places which did.
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It was to clobber Google over the head with patents and now copyright for Android, to try to force them into a patent cross-licensing deal with their distributed database patents (because Oracle doesn't scale). Check the litigation history.
Oracle giving the OSS community the finger IMO (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems to me they're saying "You've been bitching for years that the community can do better, well here you go, knock yourselves out, we're done."
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They wouldn't be able to do that without permission from on high. This is obviously officially sanctioned.
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No, what Oracle is saying is that this isn't generating any profit for them, so out it goes. And to not piss in their own pool, they've decided to "open source" it. Never ascribe to Ellison intelligence what is deviousness.
It's not unusual (Score:3)
you are not usual (Score:1)
to fire the dev team after the app is built.
do you actually work in this business or do you just watch movies about asshole bosses? "Built"? did you skip the parts where the software needs to be tested and sold? Do you really think that there "built" means "done" oh but you are not in the business, you are just a stupid troll, so what you think is really irrelevant.
No, it is not "usual" for enterprise software companies to abandon commercial support for a product, fuck-wad.
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It's not unusual to fire the dev team after the app is built. You hire some folks to do the hard work of building it and then you hire jr code monkeys to maintain it afterwards. Video Games do this.
Video games are almost like Hollywood movies, if you don't make most of it back in the first month it's going to bomb. The fans will suck it out even if it's mediocre and be done playing it, the ones who left in disgust have moved on and those who haven't tried it will be scared away by your low user ratings. If you're a software company that wants to deliver an ongoing product or service or a similar service to many customers you're never "done", even if one particular client has exhausted their budget. If
Typical Oracle (Score:2)
They did it with OpenOffice, Glassfish and others I fail to remember now. Of course they can do whatever they want with the software they own but it's so sad to see so many nice things being abandoned. I wish Sun had never gone under
Re: Typical Oracle (Score:1)
Sun had a good run.
They were incapable of really monetizing their good software, being a company used to selling server hardware. Then x86 blades were good enough to replace overpriced and slow SPARC servers, and Sun was done.