Oracle is now wholly in charge of Java — but there’s no shortage of people who have suggestions for what they should do with it! To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, the experience is no doubt akin to being nibbled to death by tiny chicks. Oracle is a company that’s used to doing what it wants when it decides to do it, but Java really is a community, so there’s bound to be input.A lot of it is pretty sensible: this slideshow from eWeek outlines 15 ways Oracle can improve Java and improve its stance with developers. The emphasis strikes me as being on the latter, with a lot of ideas that have been hashed out on this blog and elsewhere: Give Apache a Java TCK, preserve JavaOne as a developer event, set the JCP free, etc. One idea that I think is worth pursuing is to use the window opened by the change in ownership to approach Google and come to some kind of rapprochement over Android, which is Java-based but not quite Java (for reasons actually tangled up with the Apache-Sun dispute). This might be seen as throwing Java ME under a bus, but that technology has mostly found success with second-tier feature phones, and if Oracle really wants Java on a next-generation true smartphone, Android might be the best bet.There are other, more radical ideas out there; Datamation’s Serdar Yegulalp suggests that Oracle break with the past by breaking with the past, de-emphasizing the strict backwards compatibility that Sun insisted upon. He makes an interesting case for how such a move could make the language vital again; but since one of the main the motivations for the acquisition was Oracle’s reliance on Java for its product lines, will it really have much of incentive to do this? Of course, there’s the question of whether Oracle has any incentive to listen to these people at all. On that point, the recent extremely minor kerfuffle over Project Kenai is instructive; Oracle at first said that it was shutting the project down, then upon some outcry claimed that this was a “miscommunication” and that the hosted projects would be moved to java.net. So it seems Oracle is trying to not antagonize too many people, at least, but whether they’re listening to calls for change (as opposed to calls to not change) remains to be seen. Technology Industry