Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies.

The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

My employer is actively hiring java engineers and we don't "take pictures of things from far away".

There are vibrant java user's groups all around the world. There are many java community conferences. The most recent redmonk language rankings[0] show java at #3.

The world is big :) .

0: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

We all have different circles. I work for a bank and the bulk of the LOB code here is Java (or something that runs under a JVM). There are no Oracle databases as far as I know, but my visibility is limited.

Also, Oracle Applications for things like HR.

We use Java.

We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle licensing.

Apple used Java in a ton of backend stuff. At least the entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java and very very small amount of Clojure.

The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.

Interesting, the _majority_ of developers I know write in JVM languages - mostly Kotlin for new stuff at this point.

Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.

There are probably millions of corporate projects written in Java. One of the reasons Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (who invented Java) was because Oracle itself had written so much middleware crap in Java.

Both Java and C#/.NET are super-popular in Enterprise land, with the choice between them mainly being if the enterprise is a Microsoft shop or not.

Everything SAP touches is written in Java too, and it's boring old payroll stuff. There's the entire Android user interface with millions of Java-only app developers.

Oracle may well be in bed with the spooks, but it's not a Java-specific thing.

Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.

There are literally millions of us that write Java and don't work for the CIA. It's like still in the top 3 of all languages.

> The only developers I know who write Java

It sounds like your personal anecdote is particularly uninformative then.

Look at who is making OpenJDK distributions besides Oracle: Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, Eclipse, SAP, … It’s being used everywhere.

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

This can’t be a serious comment. I’d say probably half the world‘s B2B and enterprise runs on Java. Especially in Europe.

as a counterpoint - Amazon is a Java shop and most of the companies that model themselves after Amazon are also Java shops.

Amazon is predominantly a java shop as is a lot of big enterprise

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

Huh??? Google, the search engine part, is written in Java as far as I know. Yandex uses Java extensively. Odnoklassniki, once second most popular Russian social network, is written in Java. Banks like Java. Android apps are written in Java (and Kotlin, which I consider an abstraction over Java).

And that's only what I can remember right away. A sizable chunk of the world runs on Java.

The question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?

I think that overstates, there is a lot of java in the enterprise still, it's lose share to golang and typescript and in certain cases rust, but it's still around and doing just fine (to my annoyance).

What? What kind of ridiculous bubble are you in? Isn't Java one of the main languages at Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc?

it's not purely gov work—lots of legacy software (especially outside of the US) is java-based

and if you hire an offshore outsourcing company, odds are that they will insist on something java (spring) based, as that's where their experience is

And you know that they will be using Java 6 just because...

That is a silly take. The absolute majority of Java devs in the world does not work in spy agencies (sounds like it’s more about your personal network being close to that world)