After Oracle's finalization of buying out Sun Microsystems, most Java developers and OEM's were left with a cloud of uncertainty as to wether the buyout by Oracle was a good thing or a ominous sign. To be blunt Oracle's philosophy for Open Source is not exactly seen as genuine by the open source community. Not to mention the fact that Oracle's employee retention after buyouts is notorious. Notorious in the sense that Oracle is known for making talent leave after their buyouts. Having the father of Java himself (James Gosling) leave your company after a buyout is also not a good sign.
The point I'm trying to make is that Oracle of all the companies that could of bought Sun is not exactly the ideal champion to move Java forward into the 21'st century with innovation, new ideas or nimbleness (cloud technology). On the flip side I don't even think IBM would have made a good Java steward if they had bought Sun. Why? IBM in my opinion has a knack for making software (which should be simple to use) as complicated and as convoluted as possible in order to generate a ecosystem for their consultants and vendors (simplexity anyone?). But back to Oracle, Oracle from a developers' perspective (mine), is not really a technology company as so much as a company that owns IP tech. Oracle overwhelming concern is to . . . make money. Nothing wrong with that but make no mistake greed starts when all a company can see is dollar signs after they have bought out a technology which supports many open source ecosystems.
You will sooner rather than later stir friction/instability amongst those very same ecosystems dependent on that technology. Speaking of instability, Oracle's pre-emptive strike against Google though eye-opening was not exactly a surprise. Many of us developers suspected Oracle would do something like this. Oracle's patent claim though weak as hell will cause enough controversy and headaches for other vendors that I have no doubt that they are considering their options (drop java language entirely, create a new language?). I've heard various arguments from blogs that maybe, just maybe Google will be using python, jython or Go as their main development lanugage for Android.
Despite the iron hand of Oracle I see their influence in the Java being very little due to the fact that Oracle is not really a innovator. They sure like to buy companies for IP but compared to other tech companies out there, Oracle is more of a inhaler of technology than a innovator of technology. Which is why I see the open source initiatives and companies out there that will do more to push and innovate on Java than any slow, vendor driven JCP could ever do. As innovation is more relevant now to Java as the push make certain pieces of it exist in the cloud will make certain pieces of J2EE infrastructure unnecessary (big ol monolithic app servers, that take 10 minutes to start up).
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