You know that the majority of OpenJDK developers are Oracle employees, right?

Exactly. Some people think large software as programing language, compilers, GC etc can write itself. Or a few thousand dollar donation will be enough to pay to top engineers to keep working on it.

Oracle/Google/MS or Apple will continue to exert control on direction of languages they developed and open sourced because they continue to pay for majority of development expense.

I didn't know that. However, doesn't change my stance. Why would I upgrade to java 9 or 10 when I am at the mercy of oracle's lawyers?

Why aren't you at the same mercy with Java 8?

That’s not much of an answer. If anything, it seems to me like Oracle is seeding more control to the community. I could be wrong though, I don’t follow this stuff as close as some.

Coming sometime this winter they will require a license to use java 9 and up.

Below is a link for the downvoters and skeptics:

https://www.aspera.com/en/blog/oracle-will-charge-for-java-s...

Oh dear - the FUD is strong with this one. You’re only required to buy a commercial license if you use Oracle’s JDK beyond their free public updates timeframe and if you want the subsequent security patches etc from Oracle. There are also a whole bunch of $free (and $commercial) OpenJDK alternatives by Azul, RedHat, IBM, AdoptOpenJDK, distrust etc.

What does FUD mean in this context?

edit: I looked it up.

Your comment is obviously correct and valid. However, my stance is unchanged. I will stick to openjdk8 and avoid oracle regulatory influence.

Here is the rebuttal which shows that this is patently false for all actual use cases: http://blog.joda.org/2018/08/java-is-still-available-at-zero...

The first sentence from your link:

> Oracle has announced that, effective January 2019, Java SE 8 public updates will no longer be available for "Business, Commercial or Production use" without a commercial license.

Anything you can get now is still free and GPL open sourced. All they're doing is no longer publishing NEW CODE (in the form of backports and bug fixes) to the OpenJDK 8 branch. Instead they're publishing it to OracleJDK.

They're not trying to kill GPL anymore than Redhat is trying to Linux.