Maybe - Red Hat have been doing more and more serious development lately, and (surprisingly) Microsoft are also stepping up to the table. I'm talking about whole new GCs, compiler changes, etc.
Plus there's GraalVM. Graal and OpenJDK are actually totally separate teams inside Oracle, who compete with each other! They have different licensing, versioning etc models too. And they've written an entire JIT compiler from scratch, which other firms are also developing expertise in (Twitter, Spotify). So even if OpenJDK changed a lot, that wouldn't necessarily imply Graal would change too.
Same with .NET. The stunt Microsoft pulled a week ago made me think that .NET needs a OpenJDK-like model ... until I realized that without the 200 devs from Microsoft no one will care enough to continue developing .NET.
In 2021, corporate Open Source is often just a response to the market pressure of genuine FOSS. If there's no community-based product, then users are always at the whim of the dominant company, and they can choose to leverage that dominance at any time.
Well that's what you hope would happen. Is there even still a big Java community? Android is by far the biggest community of users and they have moved on to Kotlin.
There is an enormous Java community, Java is the language of enterprise. But there are not many JVM developers, and most (all?) developers of the Java language work for Oracle.
The only natural candidates I can think of would be Google or Eclipse Foundation. I don’t see Google picking up development as very likely given their legal history with Oracle, and I think Eclipse Foundation would very quickly become stretched unless organisations like IBM are able to lend money and developers.
That being said, I think one of the more exciting futures for Java involves Eclipse taking a leading role in the development of the language and the reference JDK. I view them as the most important non-profit working in the Java ecosystem, and they are already stewards of Jakarta EE.
You’re confusing language with the compiled bytecode virtual machine that it runs on. OpenJDK underpins almost all of the VMs out there. Sure Android has it’s own JVM, but kotlin, scala, closure, jruby, jython, and more all still need to be compiled against a JVM and then run inside it.
I'm not confusing them. I am aware that all JVM languages depend on a JVM implementation to run. But the point is that if Oracle lock away OpenJDK then updates to the Java language are effectively closed source. That's a separate problem to supporting Kotlin etc.
To put it another way, I'm sure the Kotlin community is big enough to continue developing/maintaining their own JVM implementation (or just use the Android one). I don't think the Java community (that is, people who contribute to open source Java code; not just enterprises that use Java) is big enough to continue development of the Java language.
Do these enterprises employ robots? Do companies not open source internal projects? Do companies not hire people to work on open source projects?
The "community" is underpinned by corporations. If you look at the top trendy languages they're generally created or heavily supported by large corporations.
Why? Wouldn't the community come together and implement any features Oracle tries to lock away in their proprietary version?