I think I need to clear a common misconception people seem to have here: Oracle has very little to do with Java.

At most, Oracle has the following connection to Java:

• Own the trademark
• Have a build of the JDK/JRE with commercial support.

However, Java as a language's baseline comes from OpenJDK, an open source (GPL 2.0) community project which is upstream to several builds including Oracle's JVM. It follows a "bazaar" like development model similar to the Linux kernel where you can see their mailing lists and track what's being worked on. Anyone can contribute and the code is on Github: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk.

That being said, you don't even need to use Oracle's JDK (it sucks IMO) and use one of the community provided builds of OpenJDK. OpenJDK builds are provided by Eclipse, Amazon, Azul, Bellsoft and even Microsoft provides JDK/JRE builds. These are free of cost and have longer term support than Oracle's offering.

Open jdk is where it's at

Java was stagnating under Sun, unfortunately. I hate to say it, but Oracle probably saved Java.