I am softening my position on Oracle's stewardship of Java

I have to admit that I got a little carried away with my criticism, fueled largely by my agreeing in substance with the position of the Apache Foundation. However, Apple's announcement and IBM's earlier announcements about working with Oracle and OpenJDK have caused me to soften my position.

To be fair to Oracle, my complaints about lack of tolerance for Apache Harmony and the FSF Gnu Java implementation apply equally to the now defunct Sun Microsystems.

The GPL license for OpenJDK is not all that comforting given the patents wrapped up in Java implementations: only passing the Java Compatibility Kit tests gets a patent waiver. Still, for Java developers, I think that all is right in the world, on a practical level.

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