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Java Oracle

Oracle Plans To Switch Businesses to Subscriptions for Java SE (infoworld.com) 217

Posted by EditorDavid from the installment-plans dept.
A reminder for commenters: non-commercial use of Java remains free. An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: Oracle has revamped its commercial support program for Java SE (Standard Edition), opting for a subscription model instead of one that has had businesses paying for a one-time perpetual license plus an annual support fee... It is required for Java SE 8, and includes support for Java SE 7. (As of January 2019, Oracle will require a subscription for businesses to continue getting updates to Java SE 8.)

The price is $25 per month per processor for servers and cloud instances, with volume discounts available. For PCs, the price starts at $2.50 per month per user, again with volume discounts. One-, two-, and three-year subscriptions are available... The previous pricing for the Java SE Advanced program cost $5,000 for a license for each server processor plus a $1,100 annual support fee per server processor, as well as $110 one-time license fee per named user and a $22 annual support fee per named user (each processor has a ten-user minimum)...

If users do not renew a subscription, they lose rights to any commercial software downloaded during the subscription. Access to Oracle Premier Support also ends. Oracle recommends that those choosing not to renew transition to OpenJDK binaries from the company, offered under the GPL, before their subscription ends. Doing so will let users keep running applications uninterrupted.
Oracle's senior director of product management stresses that the company is "working to make the Oracle JDK and OpenJDK builds from Oracle interchangeable -- targeting developers and organisations that do not want commercial support or enterprise management tools."
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Oracle Plans To Switch Businesses to Subscriptions for Java SE More

Oracle Plans To Switch Businesses to Subscriptions for Java SE

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  • First post confirms it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Oracle is dying

  • So, you can't download JavaSE for development if you're a business without paying a subscription fee OR you can't get special support and extra development applications without paying for the subscription fee?

    If you're a business that just wants to develop vanilla Java SE applications (not run on a server or anything) does this affect that? The wording SOUNDS like it's for support and Premiere/Advanced downloads but it's not wholly clear...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      OpenJDK and IcedTea (or other free software implementations) will suit most, I think, without any contracts or payments to Oracle.

  • Many applications require Java to run. I can't see my company paying $2M+ per year for Java to run those applications.

    • Correct, if you don't pay for commercial support then you don't get commercial support. Your company will have to learn to live off the open source community.

      • Correct, if you don't pay for commercial support then you don't get commercial support. Your company will have to learn to live off the open source community.

        Ha ha, just like 95% of devs then.

        • It pains me the number of times I see cut & paste code from Stackoverflow in professional projects. They often stand out as being the totally wrong solution. Even so, I often worry what sort of legal issues crop up because while the code on Stackoverflow is supposed to be CC-SA, I never seen the license or attribution included in a professional product for the little snippets people steal.

    • I'm going to assume you're just a troll, but in case you're not or more so because someone else doesn't realize it: http://openjdk.java.net/ [java.net]
      • Except my company has a corporate policy against using open source software. So that's not an alternative to not paying Oracle.

        • Well, if that's their policy, then they get to pay Oracle big bucks. They can change their policy and save money, or not.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • They hired creimer. Being a shitty company is obvious.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by mark-t ( 151149 )
            I've worked for software development companies that had policies of not using open source software as well, but it had less to do with being shitty, per se, and more to do with lawyers, and the risk of being sued ourselves if something didn't go right just because we depended on someone else's software to work as described. If software we depend upon was commercial and had an issue, we had a specific party that we could verifiably hold responsible for addressing it.

        • Except my company has a corporate policy against using open source software. So that's not an alternative to not paying Oracle.

          So uhh, what business are you in? I'm, uhh, asking for a friend...

        • Except my company has a corporate policy against using open source software.

          Sucks to be you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      what applications? the only things I run across are open source stuff with featuresets a decade old

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday June 23, 2018 @12:38PM (#56834014)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      It re-enforces the feeling most people have that Oracle's takeover means Java is ceasing to be an open, free, technology, that was already a gut feeling most had when they started suing Google.

      It was the gut feeling I had as soon as I had heard that they bought Sun instead of IBM.

  • Zulu (Score:4, Informative)

    by allquixotic ( 1659805 ) on Saturday June 23, 2018 @12:38PM (#56834018)

    Azul offers OpenJDK builds for a lot of platforms using a product called Zulu, which is free of charge if you don't want any support. IMO they're better than Oracle's OpenJDK builds because you get more platforms. I think Zulu's might also continue to get security updates for longer than Oracle is willing to provide them for old versions of Java, so if you're stuck on Java 7 or 8, this is a great alternative. Of course, updating your code so you can jump to OpenJDK 10 is better, but sometimes that can take a long time for projects hitting worst-case issues with backwards compat.

    Looking at their site, they seem to offer another product that claims better latency consistency, called Zing, that is non-free. So that tells me that Zulu is mostly unmodified OpenJDK builds (although they could be marginally faster if they are compiled with different option flags or a better compiler than Oracle uses). Zing is something else entirely.

    P.S. - I am not a shill for Azul. I've never done business with them, worked for them, or bought their products. But I have downloaded their free OpenJDK builds and find them much more convenient to download (with fewer nags) than Oracle Java or Oracle OpenJDK.

    • Azul started out selling custom hardware and software to achieve better performance, most specifically (or at least after a while) concurrent garbage collection. After 3 generations of that, commodity x86-64 hardware got cheap and capacious enough, and they figured out a variety of tricks, so it's now their Zing software product.

      They've published some interesting papers, in one they claimed a metric of ~1 second of pause per GiB collected in stop the world mode. So if your image is 100s of GiB....

      As part

  • How to kill one of the most popular programming languages in one easy step.

    • Re:Alt Headline: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Saturday June 23, 2018 @01:44PM (#56834308) Journal

      There's too much java code running in too many shops to kill. The big enterprise outfits will pay the licensing fee, and the smaller ones will switch to openjdk. I know it's popular around here to imagine that Java has some sort of meaningful competition, but if Microsoft with all its resolve to open up .NET can't really grab a piece of Java's significant penetration, then it's fantasy to imagine that languages like Python will.

      • I know it's popular around here to imagine that Java has some sort of meaningful competition

        You should check out the trajectory of Go if you doubt. I would seriously question the competence of anybody starting a new project in Java today.

      • if Microsoft with all its resolve to open up .NET can't really grab a piece of Java's significant penetration

        What makers you think it's not? Cause I'm seeing new projects started in C#, not Java.

    • You act like the death of Java would be a bad thing. ;)

  • Java has been a "legacy language" for over 10 yrs.
    Whenever Oracle gets involved, they kill lit off due to their corporate goals which are the opposite of what every client wants.

    Just look at all the projects which have forked or been killed since Oracle acquired SunMicro.

    I feel bad for the companies who haven't learned the following:
    * Never give Oracle money for anything other than a DBMS.
    * 95% of your enterprise DBMS don't need Oracle DBMS.

  • commercial support == subscription. if you do not need support you do not have to pay!

    • Why are you asking if commercial support equals subscription? If you were not looking for a return value of 1 or 0, you needed to write: commercial support = subscription

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        In hacker jargon, unlike in Java itself, a naked comparison expression implies an assertion that its value is true. For example, in this case: "It is true that commercial support equals a subscription."

    • Crack addiction == drug dealer subscription. If you do not need it you do not have to buy it!

      Same thing. Oracle starts cheap and locks data to their shitty apps where business can't function without them as they loose all data. Then they raise prices to the Moon and force the CIO to outsource your job to keep paying the fees as business has a set budget

  • ... of PLs 'up there' in terms of future-safety.

    I can't shake the notion that Oracle is doing a long and slow succession of minor Java screwups that are slowly adding up. The massive hype and influx of VM languages has been over for a few years now (a phase JS is just about over with now too), Scala and now Kotlin seem very well positioned to take over the JavaVM space (I've had experts recommend to me that I skip Java alltogether and go straight to Kotlin) and, as far as I can tell, if Google and Jetbrains

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Morpf ( 2683099 )

      Going to the back-end with JavaScript is still considered crazy by many, including myself. :P

      And yes, I did some front-end projects in JavaScript (mostly AngularJS which was actually relatively nice to work with). As I usually do projects with 10s or 100s of thousands of lines of code I rather have strong, static typing to ease development and maintenance. Plus the usage of libraries in JavaScript is outrageous. I remember couple years ago a library for absolutely ridiculous small and easy string manipulati

    • Java has just about dropped of my list of PLs 'up there' in terms of future-safety.

      Then you're not thinking straight. Java is still THE most secure widely and deeply used programming language on the planet (as an ongoing product). Sun's foresight in releasing it under the GPL ensures this. At this point, Oracle is just a steward of the GPL'd version. It would not take much for a coalition of interesting parties (Google, Red Hat, Apache, et. al.) to wrest that stewardship away from Oracle if its behavior became harmful to the GPL'd version.

      As it stands, ALL of my Java projects use Open

  • They are killing It jobs by increasing costs. Businesses will respond by outsourcing to India their infrastructure to pay Oracle more money

    They now only rent Oracle cloud, they refuse VMware motioning for PeopleSoft unless we pay 400% more plus additional core licensing.
    When will this madness end? We need a erp competitor BAD

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