Oracle Reinstates Free Time Zone Updates For Java 7

twofishy writes "The internet has been buzzing this week with the news that Oracle has ceased to provide free time zone updates outside of the standard JDK release cycle. However, at the end of yesterday the firm appeared to have a change of heart. 'We never intended for a support contract to be required to keep JDK 7 up to date. TZUpdater was made unavailable on March 8 as part of the End of Public Updates for JDK 6, and as soon as we learned that this affected JDK 7 users we initiated the process of making it available for JDK 7 again.'"

See?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

All you people who think Oracle is the embodiment of evil and Larry Ellison is the devil incarnate are... ...absolutely right.

Translation...

[msauve]

"as soon as we learned that this affected JDK 7 users we initiated the process of making it available for JDK 7 again."

Translation: we bought this thing, but we don't know how it works.

Re:Just waiting

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

for the first anti-Java rant. Just waitin'....

I have nothing against Java(though the sandbox they use to try to make the JVM safe enough to do web applets in is a total clusterfuck); but this doesn't exactly raise my confidence in Oracle's wise stewardship of the platform...

"So, um, guys, we accidentally deprecated the tool that is required to keep timekeeping functions working properly in our latest JVM release, because we apparently didn't realize that it was still necessary and were just deprecating stuff related to release N-1 more or less at random! Sorry about that. We'll consider checking for interactions next time."

backpedaling

[j00r0m4nc3r]

"'We never intended for a support contract to be required to keep JDK 7 up to date."

Bullshit.

Re:Just waiting

[war4peace]

Companies make bad decisions all the time. The real question is: would they back off and reinstate the previous state of things? In this case, whether it was intentional or a mistake is less relevant; public backlash prompted them to reconsider (or realize the mistake) and the outcome is eventually positive. Did they lie about what happened? i don't know and frankly I don't care. All I care for is what the outcome is.

Review? What's that?

[Todd Knarr]

Seriously, they have nobody reviewing these things? That scares me more than the idea that it was deliberate.

Meanwhile, what I want isn't actually tzupdater. What I want's a tool that'll automatically pull down, compile and install the latest tzdata package from IANA into all JRE/JDK installations in the standard locations. The compile and install parts are already there, just need the download part and a search for folders to install in.