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28 May 2016 - by 'Maurits van der Schee'
Oracle sued Google over some alternative implementation of an open source API. Developers world-wide are appalled by this move. Fortunately there is something you can do: Stop using Oracle products! There are plenty alternatives that are a safer choice. This posts lists the ones I could find. To avoid that this becomes a long boring one sided rant I will not explain the details of the case, but feel free to look it up: it is nasty.
OpenJDK is a free implementation of Java (governed by Oracle).
MariaDB is an (Oracle) free fork of MySQL
LibreOffice is an (Oracle) free fork of OpenOffice
Illumos is an (Oracle) free implementation of Solaris
PostgreSQL is an (Oracle) free implementation of an Oracle-like DBMS.
KVM is an (Oracle) free implementation of VM technology for Linux.
Jenkins is an (Oracle) free fork of Hudson.
I can ensure you that you buy yourself a nice amount of freedom when choosing the above alternatives. Freedom that turns out to be very valuable as Google can now testify. It seems Android is now switching to OpenJDK to avoid any further problems with Oracle. They are probably asking themselves why they didn't make this move earlier, because these run-times are almost 100% compatible and it could have prevented a 9 billion dollar claim.
And if you are doing business using an Oracle product, check out these alternatives! Even when you don't use Oracle directly, but your company has software built on Java technology you may want to check whether or not you can switch to OpenJDK to run it. Switching to OpenJDK or other (Oracle) free software can be costly in some cases, but not switching may be costly as well, as we can now see in this Oracle vs. Google lawsuit.
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