The Java Mission Control suite of tools, also known as JMC, was open sourced by Oracle on May 3rd with much applause and excitement from the Java development community. The excitement was replaced with unease as sources reported that the entire JMC development team had been laid off.

JMC is a well-known profiling and diagnostics tools suite for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) primarily targeting systems running in production. It is used by developers to gather detailed low-level information about how the JVM and the Java application are behaving. The official open source announcement came on May 5th from Marcus Hirt, a member of the Java Platform Group at Oracle.

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who helped open source Java Mission Control in the relatively short period of time it was done in.

According to Hirt, the intent behind open sourcing JMC was to provide the community with the opportunity to add new features and capabilities to the tools suite.

Open sourcing the stand-alone JMC application will provide the community with a base suite of tooling for advanced JVM features, such as Java Flight Recorder. It will also provide the community with an opportunity to build upon this tooling to, for example, expand the number of IDEs supported, not to mention provide new features and capabilities.

The final decision to open source JMC was decided by a unanimous vote on May 1st by the current OpenJDK members. As per Lazy Consensus voting instructions, voting was required to be in the open via the CFV: New Project: Mission Control discussion list. A total of 28 votes in favor (with none opposing) came from OpenJDK members Oracle, Red Hat, eBay, Twitter, and SAP.

Just a few weeks after the open source announcement, a tweet from Marcus Lagergren indicated that the entire JMC team was laid off, including his wife Klara Ward.

So Oracle executed another death by open source and laid off the entire Mission Control Team. 10 years of advanced tech know-how down the drain.



The good part is that I temporarily have a housewife with full pay who can stay at home with two sick kids today. — Lagergren (@lagergren) May 25, 2018

Following InfoQ’s attempts to get more information regarding the exact number of Oracle employees impacted and whether the layoffs came as a surprise, Ward simply stated that she wasn’t able to talk to the press. However, in a follow-up tweet on May 26th, Hirt confirmed that of the JMC team, only three were left at Oracle, including himself.

I, Erik Gahlin and Markus Grönlund are still at Oracle. — Marcus Hirt (@hirt) May 26, 2018

This turn of events has the community wondering if Oracle has largely ceased development on JMC. The community involvement and support may now be more important than ever to the future of JMC. For developers looking to get involved, the initial source of the project is based on the development branch of Mission Control 7. The final development and stabilization of Mission Control 7 will take place in the open.

InfoQ approached Oracle for an official statement, but they declined to comment on this story. Readers can also keep up to date with all Java-related news by visiting the InfoQ Java homepage.