While this leaves me with an icky feeling, being a java developer, I'm also cognizant of the fact that one of the major criticisms of Sun from the financial markets was that they could not monetize java very well.
It'll be interesting to look back in 10 years and see how Java has fared under Oracle.
It's interesting to compare this to Microsoft's languages (e.g. C#). They give away the platform (other than the OS, of course) for free and make their money on development tools (Visual Studio, Team Foundation, etc.)
They can do that because they have integrated commercial software into the platform. When someone is using .Net, there's a high probability that it will run on a Windows server and probably also use MS SQL. That's where they get their money from. In the Java world they are more likely to use open source alternatives like MySQL and PostgreSQL, rather than Oracle
One way to look at it is like this: Previously, to increase performance of a production Java app you would pay the best Java developer you could find a lot of money to make it run fast.
Now, you might still do that, but first you will pay Oracle some licence fee so you can use their commercial JVM options (and good Java developers are likely to insist on using those feature because generally JVM tuning options work very well). That take money out of the budget for Java talent.
What?!!? When did they start charging for the runtime? Admittedly, it has been a while for me, but I remember the runtime and the SDK being free. Is my information out of date, or are you confusing it with Visual Studio?
It's very unlikely that the license to run the commercial JVM will cost the same as a license to run the Oracle DB. These are two very different beasts.
In fact, I would guess that the cost of a Windows server license would be something of a benchmark for the price of the commercial JVM license.
While this leaves me with an icky feeling, being a java developer, I'm also cognizant of the fact that one of the major criticisms of Sun from the financial markets was that they could not monetize java very well.
It'll be interesting to look back in 10 years and see how Java has fared under Oracle.