Oracle moves to calm developer fears

Oracle has moved to calm fears over its plans for dealing with Java development, following a wave of criticism from the open-source community.

Oracle bought Sun in a $US7.4 billion deal last year, and has angered the web and open-source communities by filing a Java patent suit against Google Android and shutting down OpenSolaris.

The move led to accusations from Adobe that the company had taken the “axis of evil” crown from Microsoft.

According to Oracle, however, the company will continue to develop the Java Development Kit (JDK) as open source under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

“Oracle will work with the OpenJDK code base and the OpenJDK community like Sun did,” blogged Henrik Stahl, senior director of product management for the Java Platform Group at Oracle. “We will continue to develop the JDK in the open under a GPL licence.

“We welcome the cooperation and contribution of any member of the community - individuals as well as organisations - who would like to be part of moving the most widely used software platform forward."

This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk