Oracle's JDK 17 - Free Again for Commercial Use (infoq.com) 62
The Oracle JDK "is available free of charge for production use again," reports InfoQ, under a new "Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions" license.
The move, announced in mid-September, "reverses a 2018 decision to charge for Oracle JDK production use and does not affect Oracle's OpenJDK distribution," they write, noting that the new license "applies to the recently released version 17 of Oracle JDK and future versions." Donald Smith, Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle, explained the reason for this decision in a recent blog post, writing:
"Providing Oracle OpenJDK builds under the GPL was highly welcomed, but feedback from developers, academia, and enterprises was that they wanted the trusted, rock-solid Oracle JDK under an unambiguously free terms license, too. Oracle appreciates the feedback from the developer ecosystem and are pleased to announce that as of Java 17 we are delivering on exactly that request."
Smith explicitly stated that the No-Fee Terms and Conditions license "includes commercial and production use" [although the license does not seem to highlight this fact] and stated that "redistribution is permitted as long as it is not for a fee."
The move, announced in mid-September, "reverses a 2018 decision to charge for Oracle JDK production use and does not affect Oracle's OpenJDK distribution," they write, noting that the new license "applies to the recently released version 17 of Oracle JDK and future versions." Donald Smith, Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle, explained the reason for this decision in a recent blog post, writing:
"Providing Oracle OpenJDK builds under the GPL was highly welcomed, but feedback from developers, academia, and enterprises was that they wanted the trusted, rock-solid Oracle JDK under an unambiguously free terms license, too. Oracle appreciates the feedback from the developer ecosystem and are pleased to announce that as of Java 17 we are delivering on exactly that request."
Smith explicitly stated that the No-Fee Terms and Conditions license "includes commercial and production use" [although the license does not seem to highlight this fact] and stated that "redistribution is permitted as long as it is not for a fee."
How gracious of them (Score:3)
So what's the angle? I can't imagine anyone employed by Oracle leaving money on the table.
Re: How gracious of them (Score:2)
This being Oracle, Iâ(TM)d suspect there is a consulting or support contract that they are wanting to capitalise on?
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Or they discovered that it's more expensive to manage the licenses than it's worth in income.
Meanwhile killing the product would cause such a chaotic backlash that they could be kept busy with litigations into the next decade.
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Or they discovered that it's more expensive to manage the licenses than it's worth in income.
Meanwhile killing the product would cause such a chaotic backlash that they could be kept busy with litigations into the next decade.
Since core Java is under the GPL, killing it would simply result in the community making a fork, similar to MySQL. They’d lose control and credibility, and end up with nothing.
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Re:How gracious of them (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenJDK got a huge infusion of support and Oracle has become far less relevant in Java even though they think various government permission slips say they own Java
It probably took two years for the last of the trapped customers to get everything up on OpenJDK so now they face the choice of charging for optional support contracts or having nothing of merit to charge for.
Some people will install the Oracle version simply because they don't understand open source. But only if it doesn't cost a fortune.
Some percentage of them will buy a support contract so they have somebody to blame for problems. Middle managers will spend 20x their bonus to protect their bonus.
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Some percentage of them will buy a support contract so they have somebody to blame for problems. Middle managers will spend 20x their bonus to protect their bonus.
Thanks for that comment. It's a well known result that bribes cause damage around 20 times the value of the bribe. That there's such a direct connection with management bonuses should have been obvious.
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There is also a company, Azul, providing commercial support for openjdk directly. Sun and later Orachle's packaging of and access to JDK was written top down by a Java programmer who doesn't know how to package software. The result has been predictable software. Fortunately, JPackage used to publish wrappers that mede it work correctly, and someone has been maintaining one at https://github.com/nkadel/jdk1... [github.com]
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The only thing that the Oracle JDK has for it is the well-known installer for Windows, OpenJDK has had some varying success when it comes to Windows installer options.
But for an IT department a standardized installer is preferred because it saves a lot of work.
Re: How gracious of them (Score:4, Informative)
OpenJDK got a huge infusion of support and Oracle has become far less relevant in Java even though they think various government permission slips say they own Java
Dude.. Oracle will tell you Java is bigger than Oracle, I'm not sure what makes anyone think otherwise. Having said that, anyone with the HILARIOUS opinion that OpenJDK is somehow a non-Oracle Java, good grief, follow me for a minute please.
https://openjdk.java.net/ [java.net]
What's the copyright notice at the bottom of that page say?
https://openjdk.java.net/contr... [java.net]
To contribute to OpenJDK you have to sign the OCA, OCA stands for guesswhat Contributor Agreement. Please link me to the OCA.
https://openjdk.java.net/bylaw... [java.net]
The Governing Board manages the structure and operation of the OpenJDK Community.
The Governing Board consists of five Contributors:
The Chair, appointed by GUESSWHO;
The Vice-Chair, appointed by IBM;
The OpenJDK Lead, appointed by HAHAGUESS; and
Two At-Large Members, nominated and elected as described below.
Re:How gracious of them (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is offering a supported OpenJDK build for Windows, Mac & Linux.
Amazon is offering their "Corretto" build of OpenJDK for Windows, Mac & Linux.
Red Hat is offering a supported OpenJDK build for RHEL and, if you're running their middleware on it, Windows.
If you're already on the hook to Oracle for other s/w, it may make sense to go ahead and get your Java support from them too, but otherwise ?
They bought out Sun intending to monetize Java. Android took over the mobile space, their laissez-faire attitude on updates led to being effectively forced to hand off the EE spec to Eclipse (with a sour-grapes dig requiring the javax -> jakarta namespace fork), and their push for commercial licensing has led to competitors giving away the codebase Oracle's build is based around. Another prime example of Oracle shooting themselves in the foot.
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Maybe there wasn't much money on the table, and everybody stopped using it?
For example, Amazon and Microsoft both use OpenJDK versions with their systems.
Perhaps it only reduced Java adoption.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Great. Now solve for a business with 150,000 windows computers where very few of the users have admin permissions.
Big businesses need automated installers. Before Oracle made this move, there wasn't really one for OpenJDK on Windows. Now there are several because Oracle didn't bother to look down the road at the next logical step for other large organizations dependent on Java - reduce the complexity needed to run your shit on customer devices under OpenJDK.
They tried to make a money grab and fell on the
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1. I'm not a windows sysadmin, and haven't been for like 8 years.
2. Don't be a dismissive asshole.
3. Good job not speaking to the problem highlighted in my post, and hiding behind a dismissive asshole statement.
4. Why would someone want to own a packaging process for someone else's software if they don't have to? You build it, you own it. Your in-house package doesn't do something quite right for some edge case that you could never have known about? Too bad, it's your package, redo it and now you're rein
Re:How gracious of them (Score:4, Informative)
Re: How gracious of them (Score:3)
but we'll manually install OpenJDK from a zip file given Oracle's system is bad at things like having multiple versions installed anyway
Oracle's system has ALWAYS been install a filesystem position independent copy of Java, and then for convenience a cpl applet to manage your PATH env var for you on windows. OpenJDK is 100% the same. It does not get more basic than unzip anywhere and set PATH, sorry folks. The windows MSI is just that, unzip and update PATH.
On Unix and windows and MacOS you can make umpteen million copies of the Java runtime or JDK wherever the heck you want, they have always been position independent and not requiring a
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see Java's history for answer (Score:4, Insightful)
So what's the angle? I can't imagine anyone employed by Oracle leaving money on the table.
Short answer, their last route failed
.NET to fight over the people who knew what they were doing in the early 2000s. Every low-end hosting provider had PHP, JSP/Java support was much rarer. As a result, PHP dominated the low-end of the market.
.NET/Go if they knew what they were doing, or node.js or Python if they didn't.
Java was HOT in 1997 or so. However, Sun's stupid licensing agreement meant you couldn't install it by default on Linux. So perl, PHP, Python, you had support just by checking a checkbox. With Java, you had to install the OS, then download an installer, then run a GUI so you can accept a licensing agreement.
Sun shot themselves in the foot. With the dot com rise and a bunch of new users adopting Linux, it was just easier to use PHP, so PHP became the top language for low-end development, leaving Java and
IMO, had Sun just open-sourced a JDK that can be included by default in Linux, Java would be #1 by a huge margin. They're effectively #1 now in all metrics that matter, but they have serious, viable competition. Had Sun not been stupid and Oracle not continued the stupidity, Java would dominate the server market the way the iPad dominates the tablet market (yeah, there are Samsungs and Surfaces, but a tiny fraction of the share).
No one wants to pay for a license. They'll pay cloud fees or support fees, but if you say "give me a dollar for each install," few will pay (despite it being so cheap). It's not about the money, it's about bureaucracy at large companies. I work for a hugely profitable company with a massive budget. However, management is not supportive of paying for a license because of the paperwork friction involved in getting the software on the server. They want to move as quickly as possible and developers are always faster than purchasing departments.
However, the bottom line is there are many options these days. Java is not the only game in town and the server side development market is starting to really slow down, which means their competitors are catching up as well as offering new competing features that outshine Java's equivalents. Charging a license fee just made everyone switch to OpenJDK and quite a few new projects who were on the fence, went with a competitor to a JVM language, either
Bottom line, people have choices. You have to satisfy your existing customers and make it easy for new projects to get started. Oracle's nonsense with licensing was a HUGE blunder. Many new projects that were considering a JVM language went with another platform because of it. It just strengthened their competitors and provided little value for them.
Re: see Java's history for answer (Score:2)
IMO, had Sun just open-sourced a JDK that can be included by default in Linux, Java would be #1 by a huge margin. They're effectively #1 now in all metrics that matter, but they have serious, viable competition. Had Sun not been stupid and Oracle not continued the stupidity, Java would dominate the server market the way the iPad dominates the tablet market
Um... Sun created OpenJDK. It is included by default in most Linux distros. Java is #1 in all metrics that matter? Oracle continued OpenJDK, to this day. And Java kind of dominates the server market. I mean are we talking about metrics that don't matter at this point, I'm confused.
Lead != domination (Score:2)
IMO, had Sun just open-sourced a JDK that can be included by default in Linux, Java would be #1 by a huge margin. They're effectively #1 now in all metrics that matter, but they have serious, viable competition. Had Sun not been stupid and Oracle not continued the stupidity, Java would dominate the server market the way the iPad dominates the tablet market
Um... Sun created OpenJDK. It is included by default in most Linux distros. Java is #1 in all metrics that matter? Oracle continued OpenJDK, to this day. And Java kind of dominates the server market. I mean are we talking about metrics that don't matter at this point, I'm confused.
If Sun had some equivalent of OpenJDK bundled in every linux distro back in 1999, I think Java would have 90% marketshare of all deployments. Right now, it's probably like 50-60% of commercial deployments. Some metrics matter, some don't. I don't care about grad student deployments or unfunded startups or really low end work. I don't care about who gets the most StackOverflow searches. I care about who is hiring and will pay me to practice my craft, in particular shops with a decent development budget.
Re: Lead != domination (Score:2)
I see what you're saying. Honestly, does either the iPhone or iPad kind of market dominance matter to Oracle, IBM, Java itself? It is what it is, still growing and evolving, still the best tool for many jobs, the jobs it was created for.
It bugs me that Java is under appreciated sometimes, but old stuff isn't cool, that isn't going to change. I think we're better off with um... that tier of developer... the "deploy this Perl script with a bunch of random CPAN dependencies to a bunch of production servers
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The angle is probably that nobody used their JDK anymore and they fear that sooner or later they will no longer be the Java standard when everyone and their dog instead uses OpenJDK. Basically they're in danger of losing their property by virtue of nobody caring what they consider the standard anymore.
Re: How gracious of them (Score:2)
Everyone with half a brain switched to OpenJDK, making sure that they didn't owe Oracle a dime in license fees. I know that's what I did, anyway.
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My experience is that larger businesses are sticking with the old versions with old licence terms and risking missing out on security updates rather than paying to use the latest version as well as moving away from Java technologies where they could. Oracle probably realised that Java is losing out to .NET and newer upstart languages and as they weren't making the money they expected to, along with losing other Java related revenue streams like support, certification and training as well as possibly actual
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I'm pretty sure the angle is "oh, we tried to make everyone pay a bunch of money to use our shit, thinking that they would just buckle under instead of doing the work it would take to move to OpenJDK, and we were wrong."
Bait and switch (Score:5, Insightful)
Given how aggressive they were about going after commercial users last time they changed the licenses, this just feels like bait & switch.
We already moved to Open JDK and I don't seriously believe we'll consider going back.
The Question is Why Are They Doing This? (Score:1)
It costs them money to continue to develop and sustain the programming language. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Oracle are still the ones "making" Java and producing the core OpenJDK that everyone else uses to create their versions. Regardless of how much money Oracle makes, that still can't be cheap. So what do they get out of it. They're not a server maker like Sun was. It's not to give folks a language that runs better on their servers.
I can only think that they're worried about people switching over to la
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I don't think that's convoluted at all.
Given that sqlserver now supports ubuntu as a first class hosting platform, and new dotnet versions also have linux as a primary target, Oracle doesn't even sew up the linux market, especially when they want you to run their own distribution.
Also linux sqlserver supports docker, which makes integration testing and batch operations crazy easy even if you primarily live in a windows world.
Fool me once... (Score:5, Informative)
Until it's not again. And Oracle comes knocking license $$ for stuff you've put in and can't change easily.
Too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Gone off of java and sun hardware long time ago. You keep it.
Too late - ORACLE is not trustworth (Score:2)
The Oracle JDK "is available free of charge for production use again
Cute how ORACLE thinks people will trust them after the lawsuit shenanigans it's pulled in the past.
I see no reason why anyone should believe that anything of theirs is "free of charge for [any] use" - I wouldn't touch anything of theirs, at all.
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Agreed - I mean, the only reason they bought Sun Microsystems was for the lawsuit potential they though Java gave them vs Google.
They had zero interest in the actual technology and didn't know what to do with it once the vs Google was a bust.
At that point they had to revert back to their usual plan of suing their customers.
And now even that's dried up.
In other words.... (Score:2)
"Providing Oracle OpenJDK builds under the GPL was highly welcomed, but feedback from developers, academia, and enterprises was that they wanted the trusted, rock-solid Oracle JDK under an unambiguously free terms license, too. Oracle appreciates the feedback from the developer ecosystem and are pleased to announce that as of Java 17 we are delivering on exactly that request."
In other words, the "developer ecosystem" gave Oracle the finger.
That ship sailed, Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
You made people switch over to Open JDK, they invested the money to get rid of you, why do you think anyone would come back?
Re: That ship sailed, Oracle (Score:2)
You didn't get rid of Oracle... OpenJDK is Oracle. Oracle created it, it is the OSS upstream of Oracle Java.
And people will go back to the Oracle JVM/JDK, because the OpenJDK Windows installer just sucks a tiny little bit more. The last remaining non-OSS parts of Oracle Java are slightly better than the OpenJDK parts, but it's so close as to not matter for the most part. For Unix installs, it doesn't even matter. Use OpenJDK from your OS distros or grab specific versions, mix and match with Oracle JDK,
Amazon Coretto (Score:1)
Way too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Way too late (Score:2)
OpenJDK IS Oracle.. the same way Fedora is RedHat. It's literally the open source upstream of Oracle Java, AKA the reference JVM/JDK. I cannot understand why so many smart people just can't figure out the situation.
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https://adoptium.net/ [adoptium.net]
The binaries themselves are given the name Eclipse Temurin.
Re: Way too late (Score:2)
Lol, maybe, I mean that's just another binary distro of OpenJDK. Anyone can do that, Eclipse Temurin, Amazon Corretta, Microsoft Zulu, if RedHat wanted to rename their openjdk packages to RedHatium they could, and it would be just as significant. It's a different sticker on the same thing. None of those are really value adds even, the Amazon one is on AWS already, the Microsoft one is on Azure already. The RedHat one comes with their OS install. Correct me if I'm wrong but none of the above are forks r
Free isn't quite so simple. There's fine print... (Score:2)
See this for some discussion on the fine print: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oracle-java-release-17-now-free-again-richard-spithoven/
I keep using OpenJDK which is just as good for all intents and purposes.
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Do you know how long it's been since I saw someone correctly spell, "for all intents and purposes"? I actually did a double-take here. Thank you!
Following the philosophy of Gordon Gekko (Score:2)
Following the philosophy of Gordon Gekko...they were before, now going the opposite way. I just wonder what the catch is, and when the other shoe is going to drop?
Much like many developers did, I use the Azul OpenJDK myself.
Josh K.
When a thief comes knocking... (Score:2)
Sure they have a fine print somewhere (Score:2)
You use it, they will come after you with guns blazing.
Only purely dim witted idiots would take Oracle at its face value. OR bribed IT chiefs.
Speaking of Oracle, how is PostGreSQL doing? (Score:1)
I see a lot of comments where people are happy with OpenJDK and they don't trust Oracle etc. So why is the Oracle Data Base system still so ubiquitous when there is PostGreSQL available? Is PostGreSQL so inferior to Oracle? Is it the proverbial management fear of nobody to call for support so nobody to pass the buck to if something goes wrong? Something else? Just curious.
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I see a lot of comments where people are happy with OpenJDK and they don't trust Oracle etc. So why is the Oracle Data Base system still so ubiquitous when there is PostGreSQL available? Is PostGreSQL so inferior to Oracle? Is it the proverbial management fear of nobody to call for support so nobody to pass the buck to if something goes wrong? Something else? Just curious.
Well, I would submit that very few new projects or companies are underpinning their database needs with Oracle. A handful of government contracts or some such, perhaps, but I'm reasonably confident that those numbers are vastly overshadowed by Postgres and MariaDB, Amazon Dynamo if it's cloud-native, and hell, even MS SQL server isn't utterly incapable for the right workloads. No, the 'migration' is happening as the Sears/Roebucks of the world close up shop and replacements to those businesses take their pl
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I have a lot of large customers; Government, Utilities etc.; who have systems running on-premise on Oracle.
Tellingly I can't think of any of them who are putting NEW applications onto Oracle. Admittedly cloud adoption is changing things but new stuff internally is not going onto Oracle.
Still no native macOS ARM support by Oracle (Score:2)
Free Until You Swallow the Hook! (Score:2)
\o/ (Score:1)
Noone cares - put a fence around a pile of dirt and charge for a look - good luck!
Too Late (Score:2)
That horse has long since bolted. I have a number of large customers who are actively ditching ALL Oracle Java SDKs/JREs across their fleet for OpenJDK and other alternatives. They are not going back.
Oracle have been hammering nails into the Java Coffin for years and are now suddenly hiding the hammer behind their back ?
Too late
Already migrated to openjdk (Score:1)
More restrictive than the LGPL and possibly GPL. (Score:1)
The GPL does not restrict "redistribution for a fee". It restricts redistribution without the source code of derived products.
lol. that ship has sailed (Score:2)
Anyone who is likely to update shifted off anything requiring oracle JDK years ago.
Bye!!! Good riddance!