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I think it's more a perception problem with Oracle.

They've actually been fantastic for the Java platform and have been so for nearly a decade now i.e. even before the Sun acquisition. It's hard to dispute that the JVM is thriving right now with plenty of innovation amongst the various languages. And most of us were really happy to have their JRockit work (especially G1GC) embedded back into the core runtime when they could have continued to charge for it.

And people need to ask if things are really so bad with their OSS projects e.g. OpenOffice, MySQL, DTrace etc. Sure they have tightened control over copyrights but it's not like they have actively screwed their customers if anything the projects seem in a lot better shape.



Is Oracle still involved in the development of OpenOffice?

I was under the impression they contributed the code to the Apache Foundation because they didn't want to develop it further.


Actually, the Garbage First (G1) garbage collector was created by Sun not Oracle/JRockit. It did get production ready under Oracle with jdk 1.7.0_04.


Don't forget VirtualBox; IMO it beats out the competing commercial products


VMware Fusion is much faster than VirtualBox: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=vmware_vi...


Not sure what you mean by "much" faster. Most of the benchmarks have fractional differences. I think comparing an Apple only, commercial program, to a free and open source multi-platform program, VirtualBox would "win" for a lot of people, because it's not just about benchmarks.


> And what's the point of comparing the performance of an Apple only, commercial program, to a free and open source multi-platform program.

If I have a Mac and need to virtualize things, 'free and open source' doesn't really matter.


Also, don't forget that USB 2.0 support is closed source and subject to a special license.




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