If this is true (and it's far from clear that it is - the article is a rumour, and Oracle has not publicly stated anything about this), then that would not be good.
Whatever Oracle does, Java is not going to disappear anytime soon, because the whole world is using it everywhere. But it could mean that the development of future Java versions will slow down.
I think it would have been better if a company like Google, instead of Oracle, would have taken over Sun. I think Google is much more open source friendly than Oracle. Also there wouldn't have been this legal fight over Android's use of the Java API.
If Oracle really has lost interest in Java, they should sell it to a company that is interested in developing it further. For example, to Google.
A.J. Côté wrote:Does anybody here has insight on the state of openjdk compared to Oracle's?
As far as I know, Oracle JDK == OpenJDK + some proprietary code. I think they share something like 95% of the source code.