> When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010-11, Sun had not shipped a new release of Java in more than four years.[0] That's hardly a "stability" worth treasuring.
Sun went several years without releasing a new major version, but that same page lists frequent minor updates. So yes, I would call that exactly a stability to treasure.
I mean, yes, there were fewer major features, but there were feature releases in those minor updates; there's nothing wrong with having stable software. Are you also one of those people who complain that stable Debian and RHEL releases include old software? Not everyone wants to live on the bleeding edge, and Java was a heavily enterprise ecosystem (for better and worse:]).
And the latest release is no bleeding edge. After eg. “feature freezing” JDK 17 before release, there was no subsequent changes to the codebase, meaning, they found no bugs whatsoever, which did happen beforehand.
Java language development itself wasn't stagnating, as far as I understand only the release process was stuck on a licensing dispute. IBM and other members of the Java Community Process stonewalled every new feature in the hope that they could force Sun to certify Apache licensed Java implementations like Harmony.
