Re:“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic sile...
by kpil on Sunday September 03, 2017 @12:07PM
(#15162157)
To be fair I don't think that Oracle have been particularly bad to Java, except beeing Oracle.
I doubt Google was ever an alternative. Realistically it was a fight for power over the enterprise customers between IBM and Oracle, with most (non OS) products built or integrated with Java.
Maybe it was even a hot potato- someone needed to keep their strategic bet alive, since Microsoft also share the same strategy in the enterprise app segment. (Sell complex but underperforming applications to ill-advised customers using long feature lists.)
Even if they win Oracle v Google, it's been a huge distraction, a huge cost in lawyers (who knows how much they'll recoup), a big unknown and the search for an alternative has to be costly and time-consuming.
$8.3 billion almost seems like a bargain in hindsight.