Not much. I've seen no steps taken against OpenJDK yet, and even if they did an OpenSolaris on that, you could always run it with the official JDK. It would be beyond crazy if the wouldn't make one available anymore.
What probably will happen is that some frustrated developers won't use anything associated with the JVM. I don't expect to see a lot of this, though. A lot of the people who use JVM languages already work in an environment where there's more than enough proprietary enterprise software. And I doubt that it matters a lot for complete newbies.
Personally, I was on the lookout for new languages to focus upon, after playing with a lot recently. And after this, Ocaml and Erlang moved to the top of the stack, past Scala and Clojure.
Let me recap the issue as I understand it so far: Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google regarding patents infringement for their use of Dalvik in Android. This is a big problem for Google and for every other alternative JVM (especially open-source) because even for a clean-room implementation you need to be licensed by Oracle.
But as far as I can see this is not so interesting to general application developers since, I think, the majority of them targets the official JVM (open or not) anyway. The same goes for other JVM based languages, since they can generally run well in the OpenJDK.
However the general consent that I see is that this is a bad move for the innovation of the JVM platform and a move that will likely reduce the trust of the industry in this technology.
Maybe new projects will be developed upon another and more open platform, but the vast majority of application-level projects (such as the myriad of enterprise webapps) won't be so interested.
What do you think?
Disclosure: I'm interested in alternative JVM languages because in my company (who is J[ava/VM] centric) we're evaluating technologies to rewrite one of our products from scratch. Aside from my personal interest in new languages obviously.
It's too soon to say what the general consent on that issue is. The next few days will be very interesting in that respect. I wonder what IBM will say. If I'm not mistaken, their current java products (they've got their own branch of the JDK) are covered by license agreements, probably made in the Sun era. So it's unlikely that they're in immediate legal danger. Still, they might hedge their bets differently for the long term. I wouldn't really count on it, though, considering that there's no decent alternative right now, and generally IBM takes a long while to wake up.
Most of the industry doesn't exactly mess with the JVM, so they don't really care whether it's free-as-in-beer, free-as-in-speech or something in between. I think that this includes academia (where Scala is from) and consulting agencies (where Clojure is from). There's no real hard-core GNU free software crowd behind them.
I hope that I'm wrong, but I think apart from a small flock of hackers, nobody will care too much. I do think that the efforts to port both Scala and Clojure to other platforms (CLR / LLVM) will increase a bit.
A lot also depends on what Google will do. If they throw down the gauntlet and put lots of effort and money into a migration towards a different language, then the whole IT market will look quite different. But I think that's too much money wasted, to there'll be some underhanded deals and Google and Oracle will become fast friends again. If Google doesn't want to loose face by settling de jure, Oracle might drop the case and there'll be a de facto settlement.
So to summarize: From my limited knowledge right now, I don't see big practical reasons to avoid JVM-based languages. People were quite content using Java, even before Sun made their Open Source initiative. We'll just regress to that state.
Personally, I was on the lookout for new languages to focus upon, after playing with a lot recently. And after this, Ocaml and Erlang moved to the top of the stack, past Scala and Clojure.
If your reaction is common this could be very damaging to Scala and Clojure. Both languages need a steady influx of new developers to sustain and build their current momentum. If enough potential new blood balks because of this that's definitely bad news.
The whole thing sickens me. I've been very happily back on the JVM with Scala lately.
Well, to be honest, after spending quite some time as a Java developer I regard the whole JVM stack as a mixed bag. Yes, you get a lot of libraries as a package deal, but most of them are rather bloated, and do require quite elaborate wrappers. And you might end up with something "good enough" and then you'll carry around the baggage for a long time.
And I think the Scala and Clojure communities will probably do fine without me. Never mind that for work I still prefer them to unadulterated Java, it's just that when I have the choice and the design choices are wholly mine, well…
If Scala and Clojure were my only options, I might have a look into that. But as far as I know, both version aren't production quality and I don't know anything about the whole infrastructure and as of yet, I don't have any projects at work or in private where interoperability with anything .NET related is an option.
