Consider moving off Google Guava

[odrotbohm]

I wonder whether you ever considered removing the Guava dependency, as it's quite surprising to see a tiny ~30kb library pulling in a 2 MB dependency for a couple of types used. I can perfectly see the appeal of Guava in application development but for a library, Guava's habit of breaking APIs frequently becomes a nightmare for your users in turn in case the dependency resolution resolves a newer but incompatible version of it.

We're currently using json-patch in Spring Data REST but are afraid having to move off of it due to exact that reason.

WDYT?