So Java, which powers a sizeable chunk of the real-world since two decades now, without needing the help of LLMish sloppy-pasta, is going to continue to power the Real World [TM] with its language and JVM that have been created with tens of millions of human man-hours without LLMish sloppy-pasta?
I'm shocked.
I'm not only shocked: I also see there a delicious irony in the countless of LLMish sloppy-pasta code that's now running and going to be run on man-made JVMs.
So contributions to OpenJDK have to be hand-written, while internally, Oracle uses AI generated code... I guess the logic is that employees who use AI generated code (theoretically) review their code better? The whole thing still seems a little strange.
I would laugh for a week if the courts eventually found issues with using LLM content and forced companies to either publish their LLM generated code as public domain or they were forced to roll back their codebases to a pre-LLM state.
Probably won’t happen but clearly Oracle sees a potential for legal issues with LLM output.
I kind of get their overall point, even if it is ironic that Oracle is all in on AI. They don’t want a ton of contributions to review that weren’t made with care, adding burden to, as they put it: “already limited time of human reviewers”.
Especially for a project that runs to many major businesses, this could pose a massive risk.
Oracle is not a software company, but a litigation company. It will be hard to sue people because LLMs generated code similar to some code copyrighted by Oracle if they themselves use LLMs internally to generate code.
Policies like this will result in the death of the branded software.
As we move forward it will be easier than ever to just maintain and keep your fork of software with the changes you want or need. No more approval, bureaucracy, or arguing. Just tell the AI agent want you want changed and you have it.
This will be used for huge things too. Like maybe you want a specific fork of Java that only supports for each iterators, goodby linters, hello compile time error.
Oracle is just selling AI shovels. Of course it would have a hard time defending IP issues in slop code when it had famously sued Google for Java infringement.
Also, Oracle knows that it will be stronger with strong IP laws. Other companies will realize that fact soon.
How does all this AI generated code blocking gappen? Does a human decide that or an AI is tasked with sequencing that PR's DNA to ascertain its possible inhuman origins?
What if someone generates code with AI and then goes into the IDE and then bathes it, dresses it (including adding comments) etc, in a way a human would? What then? No, here I am not exploring a way to fool the code DNA checking, but rather trying to find out what the real problem is with the AI generated code? (Other than license issues, too many PRs etc)
Oracle, the law firm with a tech business attached, probably wants to retain the option to sue other people for AI-washing their proprietary code, and that doesn't work if they're also publicly accepting AI contributions to their code with no apparent concern for the provenance of it. The tech business would probably tell them this isn't going to be a needle they are going to be able to successfully thread, but the law firm is in the driver's seat.
Hilarious thing is, if I want a JDK, I'll ask Fable to write one, get Sol to review it and write tests for it, and it will be working by Monday morning. No need to get permission or anything else from Oracle. Building a complex product from many smaller, individually-testable components is exactly what LLMs are good at, and a Java SDK certainly qualifies.
And if I run out of tokens, well, that's OK too. K3 running on my own box will finish the job. I'll just have to wait another week, that's all.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadI'm shocked.
I'm not only shocked: I also see there a delicious irony in the countless of LLMish sloppy-pasta code that's now running and going to be run on man-made JVMs.
Probably won’t happen but clearly Oracle sees a potential for legal issues with LLM output.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/as-larry-el...
The register article is about this post:
https://openjdk.org/legal/ai
It is 'OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI' and their lawyers are writing the final version, according to this page.
It sounds like a sensible action, given past scars around Java and copyright, plus this is from a big old corp.
That said I personally don't expect that final proposal will end up any better.
Especially for a project that runs to many major businesses, this could pose a massive risk.
As we move forward it will be easier than ever to just maintain and keep your fork of software with the changes you want or need. No more approval, bureaucracy, or arguing. Just tell the AI agent want you want changed and you have it.
This will be used for huge things too. Like maybe you want a specific fork of Java that only supports for each iterators, goodby linters, hello compile time error.
Also, Oracle knows that it will be stronger with strong IP laws. Other companies will realize that fact soon.
code is a liability, and they likely have more to lose than gain by allowing AI contribution.
What if someone generates code with AI and then goes into the IDE and then bathes it, dresses it (including adding comments) etc, in a way a human would? What then? No, here I am not exploring a way to fool the code DNA checking, but rather trying to find out what the real problem is with the AI generated code? (Other than license issues, too many PRs etc)
And if I run out of tokens, well, that's OK too. K3 running on my own box will finish the job. I'll just have to wait another week, that's all.