The question https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/6352/40980 (yea, what a title) is about predicting the future (five years ago) and some armchair quarterbacking CEOing.
The question body reads:
Google has led many useful Java features (guava, gson); now that Oracle has purchased Sun, will it affect its future enhancements and utilization as a development language?
What exactly, or even approximately, are the legal ramifications? I thought Java was open source and would therefore remain unaffected ... ?
Should Google just buy Oracle to get rid of the whole mess, that would be cool wouldn't it ?
Do you think this is the beginning of the end for Java as a widely used language ? Its continued success as an open source/free technology is now doubtful?
I will absolutely grant that Stephen C wrote a good answer to it in its time. The information in it hasn't aged the best, but it was a reasonable answer (and would have been a better blog post - and there are many of those out there if you dig into the tech news from 2010).
Other answers are entirely meh or crystal ball gazing (and we know how poorly we do at that).
Companies keep suing each other, there are 100's of examples for that. This doesn't really mean end of the road all the time.
Java will stay around, but I think these issues will lead Java down a road away from Open Source. It will start to be more closed like C# and the .NET languages with how Oracle is suing Google even though it is "open source" (for now). And Google created Go, which with this issue over Java may lead them to eventually recreate/modify Android to use Go as well as, or in place of Java.
These answers have aged very poorly and in its locked state, the question cannot be curated at all to remove these answers.
As of the writing of this post, the question has received only 2.1k views in five years. This indicates that it really isn't a search target.
Given that the question is:
- of past current events
- not applicable today
- low view
- attracted poor answers
Please reevaluate the historical lock on it so that it may either once again enjoy the community working to make it a better example of how to ask and answer current event questions, or delete it. If the question is to be deleted and Stephen's answer that is there is something to preserve, consider transferring it to the Programmers.SE blog and backdating it to the date the answer was posted.
