the paralysing effect of rebranding

Since having acquired Sun Microsystems, Oracle has gone about with a bottomless pail of red paint on all the solar panels rendering pages ugly but consistent with its crimson facade. As a next step forward, Oracle took a leaf out of the book of Indian politicians called "Several ways to assert authority while occasionally causing havoc": rename everything you see. Asserting geekish credentials, this extended to changing strings within the JVM DLL. This "fix" released in update 21 of Java 6.0 brought Eclipse to its knees. Oracle was admirably swift in taking care of bug 6969236. It is admittedly a bad idea to depend on such internal values, but such rebranding is also a rather wasteful exercise. It's what results in wiki pages like this to be modified with directions like The best way to really eliminate PermGen problems is to run Eclipse against non-Sun JVM, e.g. IBM J9 and BEA WebRockit. It's a sad day when an IDE for a language that came from SunOracle won't run on a JVM that came from the same place. Welcome to Larry Ellison's wonderland.