Why do you think that they don't own OpenJDK? Here's snippet from "OpenJDK: How to contribute" page:

> Like many other open-source communities, the OpenJDK Community requires Contributors to jointly assign their copyright on contributed code. If you haven't yet signed the Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA) then please do so, scan it and e-mail the result to oracle-ca_us(at)oracle.com. Please make sure to specify OpenJDK as the project you'd like to contribute to so that we can process and store your OCA. Allow at least two weeks for processing. If your request is urgent contact the appropriate Project Lead.

It seems to me that they actually own OpenJDK. I'm not a lawyer, but I think that they have the power to make all code proprietary if they want.

Well they definitely can just like Microsoft can with all their open source projects which require CLA and all the other big corps with same open source model but the already published code also stays under the currently assigned license. They can only change newer version's licese which would probably cause a fork and do more damage than help

This ownership of copyright gives them the possibility to release the next version of (not-)OpenJDK under a proprietary license, but does not give them a possibility to kill off the current version of OpenJDK as every single user who has received explicit perpetual irrevocable license to use, change and redistribute the current version - so there's always a possibility for a true open source fork.

you're right, vbezhenar... i believe the spirit of my message remains unchanged: openjdk is almost entirely open source (GPLv2 + Classpath Exception).

they cant pull the this licence from already published code, which means that they cant forcefully monetize it anymore. if they tried, someone else would fork it and continue its maintenance.

There are a couple ways they are trying to do this. They’re actively fighting the court battle vs Google for copyright of the Java api. They’re also adding more features to Java that are only supported in new versions, and they can/will attempt licensing lock in for those features. OpenJDK might survive as permanently stuck in version 8, or it might survive as a fork which will divide the community.

Except the opposite is happening lol:

- Contributes pretty much all of the closed source technologies (or what was originally to become closed source) of the Oracle JDK to OpenJDK, for example giving the community: JDK Flight Recorder; JDK Mission Control; ZGC; …and probably more stuff I can’t think of right now;

- Ensures the Oracle JDK and the OpenJDK builds are virtually indistinguishable;

- Starts providing a free OpenJDK build (which includes all these donated technologies);

- Provides uncountable man hours of maintaining and innovating the Java platform;

- Ensures that the community knows where to find the free bits by linking to them, and slaps on a bright yellow warning sign, so that everyone can see that the licensing has changed;

Some bits do not even make sense: >OpenJDK might survive as permanently stuck in version 8

??? Wat?

OpenJDK is not stuck on 8, and is where all language development goes.

> which they don't own

They do own it. They own the copyright on the source code (all of it - even if Google or Intel wrote it). They own the trademarks. They own the specifications.

Apart for their lawsuit against Google, they're ownership of copyright just means they could choose to relicense future code under a different license, even proprietary if they wanted.

At that point, someone else could attempt a hard fork. Same as what AWS did for Elastic search and MongoDB. The existing release code is still under open source license and so would allow for that. But whoever's attempts that fork, unlike Oracle, would not be allowed to change the license terms beyond what the current open source license allows.

And, someone could also choose to not re-use any code, and re-imement from scratch the spec, like what Google did for Android. That said... the open lawsuit against Google is still deciding of the legalities of that one.

Don’t they claim some sort of copyright on the APIs and also restrict what can be called “Java”?