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What I don't understand is why anyone with half a brain would even venture to touch Oracle with a ten foot pole given that they've had this reputation for at least the last 25 years.

Why, people?

Not even a conspiracy theory. Just the most likely explanation.

Legal departments are ironically very much like LLMs.

They are trained on a narrow set of data and don't really understand the real world.

If you let them run wild with no supervision they'll turn your company into slop.

Someone needs to be there to reign them in, asking the all-important questions like "is suing all of our customers and making them angry REALLY the best option?" (to which they will reply, "You're right to push back on this").

This is typically the role of the CEO, however, as we know, most CEOs of large successful companies are too busy to actually do that. They're mostly training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, shitposting on their own social media platform, trying to manipulate international politics, or helping run their family nonprofit.

This is why I believe that legal departments need to be demoted. The legal department should not report to the CEO, they should report to a new role that is above both PR and legal. And that person's job should be to force legal and public relations (which we know are natural enemies) to work together. Every press release goes through legal now, and it's only logical that ever legal action should go through public relations review as well.

The fact that public relations at most large companies has atrophied from disuse in our public-equity-owned unicorporate cooperation-over-competition chaebol/zaibatsu/conglomerate world is a problem for another day.

Makes sense, but they take an anti-AI stand, which I find good no matter for which reason they do that.

> given past scars around Java and copyright

How many of these were self-inflicted?

I understand the intent of it. It's really annoying/rude when someone gives you a pile of AI generated crap and says "here, you figure it out." Anyone can type these prompts now, the hard part is figuring out if the output makes sense.

Seems like a better way to do this than ban all AI generated code, but it's probably a matter where they're far more concerned about their own inconvenience than someone else's.

(bit sarcastic) Oracle was always all in on Lawyers, right? No software was their first priority.

Let's just pause for a second and steep in the irony of "we're all in on AI, except where there are visible consequences."

The same problems that bedevil AI-written PRs here bedevil AI-written PRs at my place of work.

I'm sure it'll get better eventually, maybe, but something something Pareto principle.

Oracle is primarily a legal department that sells software licenses to give their lawyers something to extract money from customers with.

Google “Oracle org chart meme” and look at image results, only it’s not a meme.

Probably has less to do with quality and more of a copyright/license concern.

> even if it is ironic that Oracle is all in on AI

Selling it is one thing. Having to use it one's self is quite another.

Any way you spin it, the message remains clear --- dealing with AI slop is just too labor intensive and risky.

Do as Larry does --- not as Larry claims to do.

I would short his stock but it has already lost half it's value over the past year. And his credit rating is one notch above junk.

AI is going to make fools out of a lot of billionaires like Larry.

>it has left the “move fast and break things

java never had that phase. If anything it had a full binary class (not even source, e.g. long and int are not compatible on binary level) compatibility. Generally you can take an application from '98 and run it nowadays.

It's only recent changes (jigsaw in java9 mostly) that were made them to drop some of that part.

It's a clear admission that AI generated/assisted code is inadequate.

It's shocking given Oracle's AI spending spree over the last couple of years.

Java was never "move fast and break things".

Oracle Java is also basically effectively in KTLO mode.

The biggest use of Java currently is Android, and Google is on a path to migrate to Fuchsia eventually.

The second biggest use is Apache Spark/Kafka, but with LLMs now, you can pretty much re implement all of that functionality in pure C.

They just want a legal angle, since this is how they make most of their money.

It is a community implementation although the vast majority of contributions come from Oracle staff. RedHat, in particular, has made numerous contributions.

Sun's JDK implementation was made open source (GPLv2) in 2006 and dubbed OpenJDK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK

Yeah its like George Lucas, doesn't matter you care for the Jedis or the Dark Side or even Jar Jar, he owns them all.

It was Sun's project before Oracle bought Sun. Sun worked a lot with Netscape back in the day to make Open Source Software happen at all. From 1998-2004ish, Netscape and Sun were the open source projects and the strongest proponents of the licensing and development models. Oracle absorbed all that good will with the purchase.

No, their internal PRs have the same problem, but they are pushing an AI narrative from the c-suite and can hide the reality of their private code bases.

The "limited ROI on AI investment" articles will continue to percolate slowly into the brains of the LinkedIn hive-mind until we hit a tipping point, and then we'll finally shut up about how a handy dev tool with some decent use-cases is the dawning of the singularity that will replace all white collar labor and get back to actually building business value.

I don't know. I think it makes sense to have a policy like this.

I haven't written a line of code myself in 6 months, but the point is that _you shouldn't be able to tell_

What I tell people at work: Using AI is good. AI can help you do things that you otherwise wouldn't have. It shouldn't be a crutch for thinking.

In that sense, people shouldn't be able to tell that you're using AI unless the tell is that it's _higher quality_ than if you had implemented it by hand.

A good example here is a well-written document that has a _ton_ of deep research behind it. Or code that has extensive tests that would have taken too long to write by hand for the task at hand.

It's bad when it's just "do this thing and post a PR" but I write my code with AI, look at it as a reviewer, offer suggestions, put those into my steering if needed, and I refine it. The way I see it, I'm the first reviewer on everything now before passing it off to another human for review.

There have been points where having AI rewrite something was slower than me doing it, but I'm already in the harness. The cost of waiting is almost zero. What stops me from contributing to the JVM using AI written code that I understand and spent time manicuring? Can a human really tell that it's AI written?

No I'm sure they are just paranoid about license rights.

It is not when you stop kidding yourself : using AI has nothing to do to improve the quality of the code. It is a vanity status, at this point.

The irony is not lost there. But at least some department there has see the light apparently

People behind JVM are very talented.

Yeah, they kind of hit on this in their main post:

> If I use a generative AI tool to create 100 lines of code, and then edit ten of those lines myself, may I contribute the result?

> No. Your contribution would still include, in part, AI-generated code.

> I feel like that was the epitome of AI assisted but quality code

I totally agree with you on this! The engineer is still actively engaging while getting the performance gains of not having to type out functions. The Engineer is still in charge vs agentic "engineering" a model + harness can spit out whatever and the engineer is left to review tons and tons of code

Yes. AI involved.

Never forget: AI is for peons.

The FAQ addresses these questions: https://openjdk.org/legal/ai

They're just so information-dense and sprawl in scope.

Too many PRs wouldn't be a problem if they were easily digestible: But they often include these giant refactors with confusing changes that aren't elaborated.

The real underlying problem is with authors who do not understand the code they submit. If you cannot defend the PR, you shouldn't be submitting it.

The "blocking" happens on the side of the AI users. You like using AI. You are aware of this policy.

Will you submit an AI-generated pull request to OpenJDK? No? Voilà, you have successfully self-enforced the OpenJDK policy.

Or do you go to the trouble of finding an interesting issue to work on, get your agent to code it up, manually polish it to make it less AI-looking in case there are doubts, and then submit it? Yes? No. Why would you? To prove some kind of point, to yourself, that you can never disclose publicly? Most people have better things to do. Voilà, the policy is, again, self-enforced. Enjoy your day at the beach instead of trying to trick a project that is politely asking you not to trick it!

The Oracle antipathy is less about the policy itself and more about the apparent hypocrisy of hyping and funding these tools as "solving programming" and then forbidding their use on their own open source project.

If they had a policy to ban German speakers from submitting code to OpenJDK, it would have the same effect. None at all, which is maybe the point. It's another tool to categorize submissions/submitters they find problematic.

"If I don't know you, I don't merge you"

And if you catch somebody submitting code they can't explain, you don't know them anymore.

It's really simple. Open source has always had a social layer. Github culture tries to eliminate it, and that's the source of this vulnerability.

First thought I had too. I deliberately strip AI metadata from my PRs in certain orgs.

I don't think you should take "AI-first developers" seriously as a category.

The people you refer to are delusional idiots and should be treated as such.

Closer to three decades than two.

> countless of LLMish sloppy-pasta code that's now running and going to be run on man-made JVMs.

Don’t worry, I think most LLMs, when starting a greenfield codebase, don’t reach for Java, so it may be a smaller amount of code affected than you feared.

Thing is public domain can be used any way you want. The Libre style licenses are specifically engineered to make the source available to the users of the source, no such clause exists in using public domain.

If I want a JDK, I'll ask my package manager to download and install one, and it will be working a minute later. Why would you want to wait another week for something that already exists?

Please do this. I would love to see this timeline actually hold true. Production quality is the bar though. Not something that only works in a very narrow set of circumstances with a ton of caveats.

Probably it would get picked up by someone else (e.g. the Linux Foundation)? It's GPLv2-licensed, so it's not like the code is going to be risky for someone to fork

I don't think Oracle will die, but even entertaining the hypothetical I suspect that some other organization (e.g. Apache) would pick up and maintain a fork.

Way too much rides on Java, pretty much every big business has their own customized version of JDK that they support and maintain

The same that happened when Sun died: it gets bought by someone else.

IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, SAP, Amazon and others all work on the JDK. They would have to step it up to cover the loss of Oracle's contributions, but I am sure they could manage.

Regardless, your timeframe on Oracle's death seems way too soon.

You truly envision a future where every program is written in a custom programming language, for a custom operating system, for a single user who will now be in charge of understanding and maintaining it forever? That user being your grandma, your baker, your CEO?

> easier than ever to just maintain and keep your fork of software with the changes you want or need

I don't imagine this is practical or desirable for all situations. Good software is built from being battle tested by many users in many environments. Even with the advancements in AI tools, I don't imagine they'll become omnipotent anytime soon.

> No more approval, bureaucracy, or arguing

For software that can kill people or substantively affect someone’s life in a negative way, the bureaucracy is there for good reason. I don't think anyone should want someone at Phillips to vibe code the control software for an X-Ray machine or an employee at CrowdStrike vibe coding the next update before pushing it out to millions of machines.

We are forced to endure low-quality software because there is little or no accountability. I can only imagine what you propose would make an already poor situation worse.

I have my doubts about this. Brands are a about reputation, and reputation strongly affects responsibility when business decisions are made. If a manager decides to vibecode a solution which eventually fails, said manager will be punished. If instead a mainstream software is bought, and it fails - well, everybody has the same trouble around, right? It's not a personal mistake anymore. I suppose there are niches where branded software may give way, but I don't think it's gonna be a general trend.

This just reflects how absolutely clueless you are about the amount of attention to detail that the OpenJDK folks put into developing the language and ensuring that it works for all its users (which are serious users delivering actual value.) And I say this not even being a Java programmer myself, just an envious C++ dude watching from the sides.

> maintain and keep your fork of software with the changes you want or need

Then you'll have the same problem everyone who forks a piece of software ends up having, sooner or later: as the original evolves, keeping your fork up to date with the upstream changes becomes harder and harder. The bigger and more invasive the changes are, the harder synchronizing with newer releases become.

Someone brings this up on just about every AI-related thread. I think it's nonsense. Nobody wants to maintain a fork of any remotely complex software, not even with AI. And in a corporate setting, nobody wants to use your custom fork; they just want to use the standard software they already know with the quirks they've already learned.

The idea of someone forking Java with vibe code nonsense and expecting them to be able to maintain is laughable.

Except. . . (accept)... SaaS solves the problem of needing one piece of software to communicate between multiple (many) users and/or other pieces of software.

Can't picture a functioning world where every piece of software is custom and requires factorial amount of AI comparisons and reviews to patch the API to communicate. In fact, it's impossible! There's not enough compute to handle a factorial explosion.

I really doubt SaaS going anywhere.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/605/

LOL

I think it's even more pervasive than that. Why bother forking software at all? At the point in which code generation is meaningfully trivialized, software becomes entirely disposable. Anything you want, have a model spin it up. You don't even need libraries, the model can just make everything in-situ, who cares? Why on earth would I ever want to use SQLite if I have access to a sufficiently advanced code generator which can generate me a similarly high quality database system, with the added benefit of conforming to whatever my problem domain is, conforming to whatever branch of database theory I want?

Even SaaS isn't safe. I don't even have to describe your product to my system, I just have to give it a harness with access to the interface and have it replicate it locally. Frankly you can probably already prompt for that.

The only thing holding this future back right now are pricing problems and code generation quality. Both of those barriers are constantly being knocked down. We might never arrive at that future, but it's definitely a higher probability than solving AGI's scaling issues, and would arrive much sooner for technical users.