>At the time, and that is still the case today, Sun / Oracle was the single largest contributor to the Java Ecosystem.

So what? What does that have to do with what I argued?

>Java will surely live but will it thrive without all those investment?

Are you really trying to make the argument that had Oracle not bought Sun, that Java, one of the most popular programming languages, would have gone away?

Definitely, as proven by the high performance JIT and GC implementation available for Ruby and Python by the community.

Heh. OK. Oracle clearly saved Java, the most popular programming language in the world, which also drives much of corporate and government infrastructure. We live in different realities. This idea is so silly I'm not even sure if you're serious, given that SUN's troubles at the time are a matter of historical record. Java was never the problem. In fact, it was SUN's most highly valued asset. SUN never recovered after the dot com crash and industry transition to x86 and Linux, all of which led to the death of SPARC and Solaris. But let's leave it at that.

>as proven by the high performance JIT and GC implementation available for Ruby and Python by the community.

It's almost like interpreted dynamic languages are not quite as conducive to the same kind of optimizations as a statically typed compiled language. JavaScript, another interpreted dynamic language, did have massive amount of resources poured into its JIT and GC implementation. No question there were meaningful performance gains. Is it faster than Java? No. Is it ever going to be faster? No, not unless the language compromises on its dynamic nature.

And you're still chasing this red-herring. I never argued that FOSS can do a better job at evolving a programming language runtime, than a corporate sponsor. Why are you harping on that as if that is an argument to support the idea that java was in trouble and needed a bailout from Oracle?