Monetising Java has always been problematic. Linux/GPL people have always been stroppy. Making sure everyone has the latest version is a hard enough problem even without politics.
The take home lesson is that getting your language onto every desktop is hard and probably not worth the effort.
Which is sad because the best thing about Java was always how it was OS agnostic. People always used to say about Java "write once, run anywhere"... but that was wrong. It was better than that. It was _compile_ once, run anywhere.
I recently grabbed some of my old (1996) Java code from storage and then ran it on my desktop. The desktop was using a different OS, different chip architecture, everything was different from the machine it was originally compiled on. After 15 years it still ran perfectly.
C is a "write once run anywhere" language, but you have to recompile it for each different platform, which often turns out to be non-trivial. There's no way I could take C code from a Windows 386 machine and run it on a Mac or Linux multi-core 64bit machine over a decade later.
The take home lesson is that getting your language onto every desktop is hard and probably not worth the effort.
Which is sad because the best thing about Java was always how it was OS agnostic. People always used to say about Java "write once, run anywhere"... but that was wrong. It was better than that. It was _compile_ once, run anywhere.
I recently grabbed some of my old (1996) Java code from storage and then ran it on my desktop. The desktop was using a different OS, different chip architecture, everything was different from the machine it was originally compiled on. After 15 years it still ran perfectly.
C is a "write once run anywhere" language, but you have to recompile it for each different platform, which often turns out to be non-trivial. There's no way I could take C code from a Windows 386 machine and run it on a Mac or Linux multi-core 64bit machine over a decade later.