I don't know how common it is in the industry, but it's a damn fine piece of software. It's also under Oracle's control, though.

Yes, but it's GPL right? So if it's a really fine piece of software, it can be forked (not arguing if that would be good or not).

Edit: and indeed it would be nice to know if a company like Google etc uses OpenJDK or the Oracle one.

I think Google already had a lot fun with Oracle while not using their code.

If you fork, be prepared for a patent-infringement lawsuit as soon as you earn some money with it.

I'm pretty sure most companies have realized that staying the hell away from Oracle isn't a stupid move.

Actually, most companies that aren't Google (finance, government, military, enterprise) realized that simply sticking with Oracle is even a better move. I don't know if you know this, but Oracle is making more money (profit) than Google (Oracle is also a much larger company than Google). They wouldn't be doing that if people were staying away from them. Lawsuit aside, even Google itself (and Facebook, and Twitter) runs most/much of its software on Oracle technology, so I guess they're doing something right. It's just that HN is skewed in favor of smaller-scale software. When you're in the major league, Java is often the only smart option.

there may be more reasons other than technical that large businesses run on Oracle (database).

The amount of paid "consultants" that oracle pushes thru to make their sale, plus their tactic of charging what you can afford to pay, as well as the "can't get fired for buying IBM" mentality of large IT organizations means that oracle has a distinct advantage over any small competitor.

Not that oracle's tech isn't good, but there are comparable alternatives, but they are only comparable in the technical aspect, not in the (strongarm) sales aspect.

I was mainly referring to Java, not to Oracle DB. There aren't really good alternatives to Java.

.NET is a fine alternative in 80% of the use cases. Honestly, in half of the projects I see coming through, the only reason java is a requirement is because everything else is already in java; the only hang up is DB2/MSSQL/Oracle drivers.

.NET is never a good option to Java. The CLR suffers the same performance issues as the JVM and as noted in the thread above people are starting to migrate back to C++ as a result and yet .NET has the further restriction that it only runs on Microsoft systems. So with .NET I get the disadvantages of Java combined with the restriction of not being to migrate to other platforms. That's not a good deal for the enterprise.

Anybody can sue for anything. Google won that lawsuit.

True, but I think we mean the likelihood being sued.

The likehood of being sued approaches 1 as soon as you're successful in building something that makes money.

Yeah, but couldn't that happen with other open source products as well? Serious question, not sure if that happened or not.