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Discussion on: The Javax to Jakarta mess, it's even worse than I thought

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dagnelies profile image
Arnaud Dagnelies • Edited

While I share your pain, as all other java devs do, I find one thing is missing in this article, the root cause of all this: Oracle.

Basically, Oracle dumped all the Java stuff on the Eclipse Foundation but refused that the maintainers continue to use the javax.* namespace. So basically, Oracle not just abandonned it, they even forced the maintainers to fork it under another name, causing all this mess. 🤬

Citing eclipse-foundation.blog/2019/05/03...

Unfortunately, following many months of good-faith negotiations, the Eclipse Foundation and Oracle have been unable to agree on terms of an agreement for the Eclipse Foundation community to modify the javax package namespace or to use the Java trademarks currently used in Java EE specifications. Instead, Eclipse and Oracle have agreed that the javax package namespace cannot be evolved by the Jakarta EE community. As well, Java trademarks such as the existing specification names cannot be used by Jakarta EE specifications.

It's like the OpenJDK, it's actually not very open and you need Oracle's approval to touch it. 🤬

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tbroyer profile image
Thomas Broyer

I addressed it in the first post, and I linked to that same blog post from the Eclipse Foundation there:

Yes, Oracle being Oracle, they transfered the technology and documentation, but not the name and trademark. Indeed, Java EE was renamed to Jakarta EE. But that's not all, they also prohibited any modification to the javax.* packages, so everything would eventually be moved new packages. The Eclipse Foundation presented it as what Eclipse and Oracle had agreed on but let's not be fooled by that PR wording: what would you expect from the company that almost ruined our whole industry with the trial against Google over Android?

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dagnelies profile image
Arnaud Dagnelies

Ah, indeed, sorry. I only read that second article 🙄😅