Socially and politically I don't see much opposition. Nobody in Congress is getting mad about paying for Oracle and nobody protesting in the street even knows what their product is. And realistically, that's probably just how Oracle likes it. The less you know about them the better, their job is twisting the arm of your favorite business and little else.
At least in the field of software, Oracle probably considers the proliferation of free software an enemy. But even then, Oracle mastered the art of obfuscating open interfaces and charging people money for support contracts. It's hard to choose any one thing that kills Oracle, but high-quality free software probably goes a long way towards forcing them to change.
> Or why is that a bad omen?
Oracle is a do-nothing company in the most literal sense. You can only have so many of them around before capitalism as a whole collapses under the weight of it's own incompetence.
Maybe this is true wrt their main product, I neither know nor care about it. The sooner it leaves this Earth, the better for all of us as far as I am concerned. But both OpenJDK (and Java generally) and MySQL have been on fire since they were acquired by Oracle. Compare the stagnation during the last few years under Sun with massive features that's been coming to both more recently:
Java got many shiny things, a few examples off the top of my head: an almost pauseless GC leagues ahead of all FOSS competition, modules, Go-style green threads, many language features like immutable records, ADTs, switch expressions, etc. Things like value types are on the horizon.
Oracle is by far the main developer of both the language and its most popular implementation. Adoptium and company mostly just take the source and repackage under their own brand.
> Oracle is a do-nothing company in the most literal sense. You can only have so many of them around before capitalism as a whole collapses under the weight of it's own incompetence.
Pretty hyperbolic. There's already a reply to your post that talks about what Oracle have done with Java, but rest assured that Oracle has and does employ armies of developers - as well as sales people and the rest of the big software ecosystem. Whether you like what they build is another thing - it's hard to get excited about boring gigantic ERP systems for example - but saying they don't do anything is absurd.
At least in the field of software, Oracle probably considers the proliferation of free software an enemy. But even then, Oracle mastered the art of obfuscating open interfaces and charging people money for support contracts. It's hard to choose any one thing that kills Oracle, but high-quality free software probably goes a long way towards forcing them to change.
> Or why is that a bad omen?
Oracle is a do-nothing company in the most literal sense. You can only have so many of them around before capitalism as a whole collapses under the weight of it's own incompetence.