as anyone who's maintained a large old java codebase will know: there's adapters for all the popular logging frameworks so they interoperate

so yes, it can be

Because those maintainers' time is free?

Where do these adapters come from?

typically other logging projects

eg. slf4j has adapters for logback/log4j/java.util.logging/commons-logging/...

you can also implement it yourself, I've done it several times in both directions, both:

   - BigCoLogger -> OpenSourceLogger
   - OpenSourceLogger -> BigCoLogger

they take at most a day to write, as the Logger and its factory are two well-specified small interfaces

Right, so your solution to avoid relying on an open source library for your company's success is to use an open source adapter to rely on another open source library. It seems to the unenlightened like you're still depending on an open source library for your success, you've just changed which one?

Shuffling the deck chairs around is one solution, I suppose. If all the deck chair makers get fed up, what then?

did you read my comment or are you being deliberately obtuse?

we have our own logging libraries, but other pieces of software we integrate with depend on the log4j interface

so we have an adapter (that we wrote) that swaps out the log4j implementation for ours

if all the open source logging disappeared tomorrow we'd be absolutely fine

and everyone else would write a trivial adapter for Oracle's java.util.logging and they'd be absolutely fine too