not sure what will remain of Java if Oracle starts charging people as I understand from this http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_...

All they're doing is starting to actually enforce the rules that always existed around the commercial features. As most people I guess don't use them and you have to pass a special command line flag to unlock those features anyway (so you can't really use them by accident), I don't think it'll change much.

People will flock to .NET (core) en masse. Or maybe not as they are charging only for certain set of sub products.

I kinda wonder if enterprise customers[1] wouldn't also switch to Azul Systems version of Java.

[1] Large corporations that will through money around to avoid trouble.

java itself will be fine, people just use OpenJDK. It's some of the more advanced add-on features that are behind Oracle's paywall.

Lets see for how long if Oracle removes it from the open or withdraws their developers, which happen to be the majority of them.

Apparently people keep forgetting that OpenJDK is mostly developed by the same company and developers that they love to hate.

It is, yes, but there's been a steady outward movement of Oracle engineers to other companies. Red Hat picked up one of their top performance engineers to work on Shenandoah and Twitter picked up the compiler engineer who was leading their AOT efforts.

Additionally, so many companies depend on Java (including Oracle!) that if they suddenly laid off the entire developer workforce I suspect they'd all be hoovered up by other companies and put right back on their old duties, just in different offices.

Also it seems a lot of the JVM engineers are based in Russia, where presumably their costs are not that high.

Not at the same scale of Java, but I have seen lots of companies across my home country to bet their business in xBase (namely Clipper and FoxPro) and Turbo Pascal/Delphi in the 80 and 90's.

We all know how critical to the daily business those languages have become.

Which, if actually useful, will be cloned and potentially opened.