Will Oracle Kill the Java Community?

That’s the question on everyone’s mind at this year’s JavaOne developer conference, the last show before Oracle’s planned US$7.4 billion buyout of Java’s creator, Sun Microsystems. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made a surprise appearance at the show’s opening keynote Tuesday and tried to assuage developer concerns. While he implied that there would be some changes, he said, essentially, that it will be business as usual for Java when the acquisition is concluded.

But Oracle is no Sun. Sun has long struggled to keep its diverse community of developers happy, creating a burdensome bureaucracy to manage the development of Java standards and gradually releasing key components of the platform under an open-source license…