Oracle plans to offer a commercial Java Virtual Machine

In a presentation at the QCon Conference currently being held in San Francisco, Adam Messinger said that, in the future, Oracle plans to offer both a free and a commercial variant of the OpenJDK-based Java Virtual Machine (JVM). According to Oracle's Vice President of Development, both variants are to be based on a version, currently in development, which combines the JRockit VM and the HotSpot JVM. Oracle had announced that it would start working on a unified virtual machine in February 2010, shortly after taking over Sun. This was later also confirmed in the Java keynote at the JavaOne conference.

In February, the focus had been on the control features and user interface of Oracle's JRockit, and on the performance features of Sun's HotSpot JVM. The Oracle executive didn't mention how the free version will differ from the commercial JVM. Neither did Messinger give any price details, but he did say that Oracle will offset its investment in Java in other areas, and that there will always be a well-functioning, free JVM. It's probable that the commercial variant will at least offer better integration with Oracle's middleware products.

(crve)