Oracle Criticized Over Price Change for New Oracle Java SE Licenses (crn.com) 104
While Oracle's existing Java corporate licensing agreements are still in effect, "the Named User Plus Licensing (user licenses) and Processor licenses (server licensing) are no longer available for purchase," reports IT World Canada. And that's where it gets interesting:
The new pricing model is based on employee count, with different price tiers for different employee counts. The implication is that everyone in the organization is counted for licensing purposes, even if they don't use Java software.
As a result, companies that use Java SE may face significant price increases. The change will primarily affect large companies with many employees, but it will also have a significant impact on medium-sized businesses. Although Oracle promises to allow legacy users to renew under their current terms and conditions, sources say the company will likely pressure users to adopt the new model over time.
The move is "likely to rile customers that have a fraction of employees who work with Java," Oracle partners told CRN, though "the added complexity is an opportunity for partners to help customers right-size their spending." Jeff Stonacek, principal architect at House of Brick Technologies, an Omaha, Neb.-based company that provides technical and licensing services to Oracle clients, and chief technical officer of House of Brick parent company OpsCompass, told CRN that the change has already affected at least one project, with his company in the middle of a license assessment for a large customer. He called the change "an obvious overstep."
"Having to license your entire employee count is not reasonable because you could have 10,000 employees, maybe only 500 of them need Java," Stonacek said. "And maybe you only have a couple of servers for a couple of applications. But if you have to license for your entire employee count, that just doesn't make sense...." Stonacek and his team have been talking to customers about migrating to Open Java Development Kit (JDK), a free and open-source version of Java Standard Edition (SE), although that was a practice started before the price change.
He estimated that about half of the customers his team talks to are able to easily move to OpenJDK. Sometimes, customers have third-party applications that are written for Java and unchangeable as opposed to custom applications that in-house engineers can just rewrite.... Ron Zapar, CEO of Naperville, Ill.-based Oracle partner Re-Quest, told CRN that even without a direct effect on partners from the Java license change, the move makes customers question whether they want to purchase Oracle Cloud offerings and other Oracle products lest they face future changing terms or lock-in.
As a result, companies that use Java SE may face significant price increases. The change will primarily affect large companies with many employees, but it will also have a significant impact on medium-sized businesses. Although Oracle promises to allow legacy users to renew under their current terms and conditions, sources say the company will likely pressure users to adopt the new model over time.
The move is "likely to rile customers that have a fraction of employees who work with Java," Oracle partners told CRN, though "the added complexity is an opportunity for partners to help customers right-size their spending." Jeff Stonacek, principal architect at House of Brick Technologies, an Omaha, Neb.-based company that provides technical and licensing services to Oracle clients, and chief technical officer of House of Brick parent company OpsCompass, told CRN that the change has already affected at least one project, with his company in the middle of a license assessment for a large customer. He called the change "an obvious overstep."
"Having to license your entire employee count is not reasonable because you could have 10,000 employees, maybe only 500 of them need Java," Stonacek said. "And maybe you only have a couple of servers for a couple of applications. But if you have to license for your entire employee count, that just doesn't make sense...." Stonacek and his team have been talking to customers about migrating to Open Java Development Kit (JDK), a free and open-source version of Java Standard Edition (SE), although that was a practice started before the price change.
He estimated that about half of the customers his team talks to are able to easily move to OpenJDK. Sometimes, customers have third-party applications that are written for Java and unchangeable as opposed to custom applications that in-house engineers can just rewrite.... Ron Zapar, CEO of Naperville, Ill.-based Oracle partner Re-Quest, told CRN that even without a direct effect on partners from the Java license change, the move makes customers question whether they want to purchase Oracle Cloud offerings and other Oracle products lest they face future changing terms or lock-in.
What? Oracle raises the price... (Score:1, Redundant)
Same category as "Water still wet! Outrage ensures!"
This has been the status quo since Larry started.
Re:What? Oracle raises the price... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two solutions:
1. Don't use Oracle.
2. Hire a tiny contractor company to do your DB work, so the fee is based on their headcount, not yours.
I use solution #1. I am a very satisfied non-customer.
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There are two solutions:
1. Don't use Oracle.
2. Hire a tiny contractor company to do your DB work, so the fee is based on their headcount, not yours.
I use solution #1. I am a very satisfied non-customer.
Oh, that'd be an interesting racket. Be a sole proprietor contractor "owning" lots and lots of licences for my contractees... what sort of premium could I charge? More importantly, what sort of premium should I charge to cover the headaches of having to deal with oracle as a teensy tiny player by headcount?
#2 is an interesting idea, but #1 seems to be preferrable overall despite the lack of premium to charge larger companies. Well, maybe if you're a masochistic lawyer rather than a techie by trade.
Re:What? Oracle raises the price... (Score:4, Insightful)
Weird, I read that as "Don't use Oracle".
There are other databases that work. Some of them don't even require licenses.
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This is about Java development, but there are still other JDKs that work and some of them don't even require licenses.
Meanwhile to store your data from your Java, or other, code you can even use a database from Oracle that doesn't require paid licenses: MySQL (community edition).
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Hmm...yeah, see how well that goes over, with no paid support in a large 24/7 uptime server room for a multi-national company or maybe major US federal government installation.
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Hmm...yeah, see how well that goes over, with no paid support in a large 24/7 uptime server room for a multi-national company or maybe major US federal government installation.
And if you are the federal government is your employee count every federal government employee? If you are a multi-national corporation does it include your entire workforce globally?
I'm retired from my local civic government. We had about 10,000 employees (including garbage collectors, lifeguards, librarians, snow plow operators, etc), the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with IT. Does not sound like a very realistic licensing model to me.
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Do you think Oracle's lawyers did not consider option #2? The normal licenses probably have some "not-as-a-service" clause to prevent that kind of model.
Re:What? Oracle raises the price... (Score:4, Informative)
The normal licenses probably have some "not-as-a-service" clause to prevent that kind of model.
Probably not... It would be fine most likely but they'd have to contract out the business function those employees use a Java application for And in a manner where the contractor owns or leases and fully manages all the hardware devices that Java would be running on - they'd probably be reluctant to transfer all employees that need Java AND ownership of all the desktops or laptops they use to a contractor who would then have to license the software and perform all IT management of the devices -- the parent company's IT and Information Security teams would not be able to control those devices anymore.
Java SE is infrastructure required to run other software. And personal use is "Free".. the whole point of purchasing licenses is in order to run services (Such as Ecommerce apps written in Java that run websites) and/or Commercial use of the software.
The term wouldn't be necessary: software is Only licensed to run on hardware owned by or leased to and managed by the Licensee for their exclusive use -- this is a common condition that even MS Windows has: if you have 100 Volume licensed copies of windows - your company CANNOT utilize any of those license's on a partner organization's equipment, or any 3rd party's device, Not even with a contract between the two of you.
If you hire a contractor; They cannot legally install a Java license provided by them on YOUR equipment - you would need to provide the license for use on your hardware, Or they'd have to use equipment owned by the licensee for whatever their contracted work is - you could only do that if the contractor owns the equipment that Java is going to be installed and operated from.
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software is Only licensed to run on hardware owned by or leased to and managed by the Licensee for their exclusive use -- this is a common condition that even MS Windows has: if you have 100 Volume licensed copies of windows - your company CANNOT utilize any of those license's on a partner organization's equipment, or any 3rd party's device
You've heard of SaaS, right? That's not runtime as a service. You just develop and host the whole application on your hardware.
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You've heard of SaaS, right? That's not runtime as a service. You just develop and host the whole application on your hardware.
I know of SaaS, but so what? You would need special licensing to be a SaaS provider. Again, even Windows has that restriction where you gotta be a MS partner and obtain a license addendum, since the standard license does Not allow you to so much as Host another companies' website on your IIS server.
Re: What? Oracle raises the price... (Score:2)
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Yeah... OpenJDK exists for a reason. Use it!
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Orace Java IS OpenJDK (but OpenJDK is not oracle Java), as it is build on top of OpenJDK in their build process, with some unnecessary stuff added to it. If your app compiles with OpenJDK (meaning it doesn't use any Oracle libs), it is very unlikely that you will see any difference between those two. I would even say that it is far more likely that you will have problems with Oracle Java because of licensing issues.
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Is Oracle's support all that useful? I've been running with OpenJDK for more than a decade now and I am thrilled about it. Any hiccup I've ever had was well documented in SO and other communities. What does a paying JVM has that OpenJDK doesn't ?
Re:What? Oracle raises the price... (Score:5, Insightful)
The headline is a bit misleading.. It is Not a price change people are upset about: It sounds like they're adopting a Discriminatory contracting practice. Java used to be a per-seat cost. But now they are moving to discriminate against companies with a larger headcount, regardless of how many instances of the software are being used.
It be like going to store to buy a Television, and when you ask for the price.. Instead of the unit having an advertised price: they ask you how many people are in your family and charge you $500 per family member. OR.. What they really want to do is ask you how much money you have, and the price of a television is set at $800 plus 1% of your total assets.
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This is Oracle we are talking about so it's more likely to be $800 + 101% of your total assets.
contractors, outsourcers as well so cleaning crew (Score:2)
contractors, outsourcers as well so even the outsourced cleaning crew needs to have license per worker as well.
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It would be like going to a car dealer and instead of telling you the price of the vehicle, they ask how much money you make and then base the model and price on how high of a monthly car payment you can afford to make. Oh wait...
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they ask how much money you make and then base the model and price on how high of a monthly car payment you can afford to make.
That isn't really pricing the goods based on your worth - that's learning about your customer and persuading them to buy more based on the means, And you don't have to work with the salesperson like that --- You can bring your own financing, And pick the model you are buying.
But sure.. the cost of borrowing money is priced like that, Because you're borrowing money, and the more
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What they really want to do is ask you how much money you have, and the price of a television is set at $800 plus 1% of your total assets.
That's how most B2B products are sold. It's why prices are never listed - you have to "call for a quote" and talk to some sales weasel about your "needs". What he's really doing is probing to find out how much $$$ you have, how badly you need the thing, and setting the price accordingly.
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That's how most B2B products are sold. It's why prices are never listed - you have to "call for a quote"
No; B2B products actually have a price, usually.. the Call for Quote thing is a tactic to help their salespeople and/or Reseller partners. If they just list the price, then you check it, don't find the price appealing, and never call them... Then they lose out on that "lead" altogether. IF you call for a quote, then at least they know your company is interested, And they can continue to sal
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The headline is a bit misleading.. It is Not a price change people are upset about: It sounds like they're adopting a Discriminatory contracting practice. Java used to be a per-seat cost. But now they are moving to discriminate against companies with a larger headcount, regardless of how many instances of the software are being used.
It be like going to store to buy a Television, and when you ask for the price.. Instead of the unit having an advertised price: they ask you how many people are in your family and charge you $500 per family member. OR.. What they really want to do is ask you how much money you have, and the price of a television is set at $800 plus 1% of your total assets.
I don't know why that part is shocking. This is bog standard across the industry for enterprise software licensing. It's absolutely based on "How much money do you have?" and proxy metrics for that. They always involve a progressive pricing scheme that scales up with your ability to pay. Like with individual wealth, big corporations have exponentially more money than small ones.
For backup software, how big are your storage devices? On top of some rate per backed up system. Scaled in multiple dimensions to b
why don't they switch to openjdk ? (Score:2)
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Most places can uninstall their Oracle JDKs, install one of the many OpenJDKs and they're off and running.
The exceptions are if they allowed themselves to get suckered on Oracle's proprietary vendor lock-ins, such as: WebStart, JavaFX, Java Flight Recorder or Java Mission Control.
Re: why don't they switch to openjdk ? (Score:2)
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He estimated that about half of the customers his team talks to are able to easily move to OpenJDK
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Looks like someone didn't even bother to read the summary:
He estimated that about half of the customers his team talks to are able to easily move to OpenJDK
That's not half of all people using Java. That's just half of the people who are customers of one small company. Big difference. People have hated Oracle for a very long time and if it was really that easy to switch away from Oracle products, everyone would have done it already.
The idea that everyone is just going to dump Oracle and switch to something else is just wishful thinking. Oracle has made a lot of money from their shady business practices, and that means they can afford to buy up other comp
Re:why don't they switch to openjdk ? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. I've worked for a number of companies that really were too stupid to make that change even when it would have been trivially easy to do so. They were hooked on support by a big company (not that the support was actually worth anything).
A tax instead of a license (Score:4, Insightful)
It looks like more like a tax per employee than a license.
Will just reinforce the trend to hire contractors instead of employees, or have employees on a distinct entity.
Dos not sound any good what they are doing at Oracle.
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Oracle has one move. (Score:5, Interesting)
This god forsaken company I swear.... When I was working in government about a decade ago we had a 7 man team migrating legacy java/OracleDB apps over to Python Django/Postgres stacks (Its a very competent "enterprise" type stack thats remarkably fast to develop for.) and we had to devote one guy full time to just talking with lawyers and dealing with Oracle bullshit as they threw *everything* at us to try and stops. And so what did they do? Raise the price by "auditing" us (what other company has the audacity to think they can "audit" the government?!) and deciding that our VMs where all going to be billed as entirely separate servers, and since the VM servers all where 16+ cores (despiite usually ony 1 or 2 core available to the vm) suddenly they where demanding *millions* off us.
What other batshit insane company thinks "This client is trying to leave us, lets raise the prices on them!".
We terminated those contracts as fast as we could. And that sure a hell kept the lawyers busy. The department WANTED to actually ban all oracle products after that, but it turned out its a lot harder to leave the Oracle Financials product suite than it is to leave Java/OracleDB
Re:Oracle has one move. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oracle has one move. (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, I don't think this submission is a dupe, but the sense of déjà vu is so strong that I find myself wondering not only whether the insanity of Oracle licensing is unbounded, but where it fits in the fast-growing hierarchy.
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Its non stop bullshit and it has been for almost my entire career (And I started in this industry when Flanno shirts and hard rock bands from Seattle where in vogue, so lets just in the meantime note that grey hair *happened*). Whats worse is they keep monumentally fucking up billion dollar contracts NON STOP.
And some of those its just "Govt budgeted 2 billion dollars for some relatively uncomplicated app that I could probably build with 5 good men , a graphic designer/UIX guy and four months time, and some
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In Canada we have CGI. They are like the oracle of your story. I don't remember when is the last time they actually delivered something working.
They don't think ahead (Score:2)
Oracle - probably thanks to its founder - is very focused on making money in the present. They don't think further ahead than the next profits announcement. Which works up until the point that suddenly isn't doesn't because all their customers have effed off elsewhere.
I'll given them another 10-20 years before even their RDBMS has been superceeded by new tech (which they'll attempt to play catch up with and fail) and they go the way of the Dodo.
Re:They don't think ahead (Score:4, Informative)
I'll given them another 10-20 years before even their RDBMS has been superceeded by new tech>...
We dumped Oracle for PostgreSQL more than ten years ago, and we haven't had a single regret.
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And...who does your paid support for PostgreSQL?
That's often a major consideration for large LARGE corporate or govt entities...they need someone to have a finger to point to when something breaks.
Is there somewhere that does paid support for Postgres?
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Because the advent of the cloud, we had mostly switched to MySQL Percona, which do provide enterprise supports.
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Thank you...interesting.
I'll look into that!
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Plenty. EnterpriseDB would be an obvious choice. But because it's open-source, ANYONE can do support if they know C++ and are willing to learn the internals.
Generally, though, stuff doesn't just break, unless there is an underlying hardware or kernel failure.
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I think Oracle has overplayed their hand. They have made so many people angry for so long now and their products are not really first-rate anymore, there is no way they can survive that long-term.
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Wish I could agree, but it's my experience, going all the way back to the days when organized crime was open and rampant, that extortion rackets have ways to keep people paying, and, in the short- to medium-term, it is ALWAYS more healthy to just pay the tax.
So my guess is they'll be collecting that tax from most larger companies, or anyone else unfortunate enough to have ever done business with them, for a long, long time.
The way they lose over time is that pretty much no one willingly chooses Oracle produ
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Ditch Java (Score:1)
Java sucks anyway. There's lots of better alternatives, no need to be extorted by Larry Ellison.
Re:Ditch Java (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, there are not "lots of better alternatives" to Java . What Java is good for, there is rarely anything better, and never anything cheaper. It's just like all the morons who are like "there are lots of better alternatives to C++". No, there aren't; if there were, no one would ever choose to do any work in C++ ever, other than maintenance work.
OTOH, there are "lots of good alternatives" to Oracle JDK: OpenJDK, Amazon, Redhat, Azul, etc.
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What Java is good for, there is rarely anything better, and never anything cheaper.
I concur. Java fills an unparalleled role: Cross-platform binaries, 100% backwards compatibility from the dawn of time, excellent IDE support across all platforms, and a host of other positives. I haven't found any other language that even comes close. Not C, not C++, not Python, not C#, not anything.
Not only are there not "lots of better alternatives", there is not even a single potential peer.
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Haha, no. .NET Core has all that and more.
While C# started 20 years ago as a Java clone, there's been so much love put into it that it's completely eclipsed Java both in language functionality and development tooling.
Anymore I detest working in Java, C# just makes so much more sense.
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Cross-platform binaries, 100% backwards compatibility from the dawn of time,
This is a famous feature, and I admire and respect it, but it is also a feature I have rarely, rarely needed. Usually I want the source.
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I did not know you could compile java to binary and have it worked on all platforms without any preinstalled software, that is neat! how you do that ?
Python works on pretty much all platform, often comes preinstalled even as the licensing allows it. Not sure why it makes your list.
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What Java is good for, there is rarely anything better,
Well, that much of your post is true.
There are few if any languages that are better at driving customer demand in the enterprise DRAM industry.
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I don't trust Oracle not to sue over OpenJDK.
And for a lot of problem domains, C#/.NET Core (which unlike .NET Framework is open-source and cross-platform) is a completely acceptable replacement.
You still have to trust Microsoft not to sue.
But they don't have a long history of suing their own customers. Oracle does.
Adopt OpenJDK (Score:2)
https://adoptium.net/ [adoptium.net]
https://blog.adoptopenjdk.net/... [adoptopenjdk.net]
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Always.. There are a few features that aren't in OpenJDK vs. the licensed, blessed St. Ellison version but it works just fine.
So they're reporting that Oracle changed its price (Score:2)
You'd think that reporting on the price hike would be the more newsworthy headline than the fact that they're criticized for it.
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Kotlin (Score:2)
Just saying.
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Kotlin does in effect discriminate against Japanese people by having keywords named "var" and "val", which most Japanese would pronounce the same.
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It's FRIED RICE, you plick!
Why pay Oracle? (Score:2)
There are lots of organizations providing JRE/JDK in various forms. Why license from Oracle? Just move to a different provider.
Tell me why it's not that simple?
3rd party libraries and services. (Score:4, Informative)
Someone answered this on up-thread.
If your whole stack is your own code, then sure, recompile against OpenJDK. But many will be using libraries made by others, which may only work on Oracle's JDK/JRE. You can hope that they will rebuild on OpenJDK or fix bugs that happen on OpenJDK (or others), but you may even be using code from companies that no longer exist, and all you have is the bytecode.
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There are a few reasons I can think of. First, Oracle has bundled proprietary tools and features with it's java for a long time, and any software depending on those tools will need a rewrite to work with other Java distributions. Second, I have seen software using/abusing the bundled libraries to the point where even a minor update/bugfix in a library could break the software, and JRE/JDK provided by other companies than Oracle would not work at all. Probably not as common today, but I can still see this ha
Just use Azul's JDK (Score:3)
Foot, meet bullet! (Score:3)
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Take notes, kids. This is how you kill a product.
Re:Foot, meet bullet! (Score:4, Informative)
First, this has nothing to do with Java. This is about an Oracle product, called Oracle JDK (notice the "Oracle" at the front of that?), which no one has to use. When Redhat raises prices, do people say "oh no, Linux is expensive? people will switch to Windows?" (Checks notes
There are free alternatives to Oracle JDK, and (since it's open source) they're all almost identical: OpenJDK, Amazon, Redhat, Azul, etc.
Not only direct employees (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only direct employees, contractors/consultants also count.
"Your company has a total employee count of 28,000 as detailed in the Employee for Java SE Universal Subscription definition below. This includes 23,000 full-time, part-time and temporary employees plus 5,000 agents,
contractors and consultants. Therefore, the price would be 28,000 X $USD 6.75/month X 12 months = $USD 2,268,000/year."
I guess you need to spin off your dev team into it's own whole owned company and provide some kind of software as service? Don't know how that would pass muster.
for govment that may even mean inmates as well (Score:2)
for govment that may even mean inmates as well.
Well they work for you even at say $0.13/hr - $2.00/HR.
Don't buy from Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
r/leopardsatemyface (Score:2)
Seriously? (Score:2)
Java by now is opensource and there are many non Oracle implementations and builds available based on OpenJDK. Whoever nowadays still uses the official Oracle implementation must have a serious reason (licensing requirements for instance)
So what is the big issue here?
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Yeah, I'm not sure I've understood why anyone was still buying official Oracle Java VMs anyway for a long time now. There might be some exceptions, unfortunately, like someone might be using a micro-controller optimized version of the Java VM for embedded systems stuff (you know...what Java was originally designed for) and those VMs from Oracle (Sun) are not readily available elsewhere. But for the vast majority of the market, better solutions from better vendors have been around for a long, long time. E
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Oracle has zero value add (Score:1)
Oracle Antics (Score:4, Insightful)
It's Oracle antics like this that make me chuckle when I see people buying in to their public cloud. We all know how Oracle operates. They sucker you in and then they make it difficult/expensive to leave.
"Oh, we can help you with those fat Oracle DB fees that you can't seem to get out from under. Just put all your shit on OCI and we'll cut those licensing fees for ya. AWS/GCP/Azure won't do that for ya! Come on in...here, let me get you some of our Oracle branded Yeti mugs and some other swag while you're signing up."
P.T. Ellison.....people never seem to learn.
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You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave
Remember why (Score:2)
Y'all youngsters know *why* Larry bought Sun, right? It had nothing to do with making money. It had everything to do with Larry attempting to go "thermonuclear" on Google/Android for daring to venture into his late, dear friend's area (Jobs...iPhone). That has not played out as Larry had hoped. I assume at this point, he's either (1) trying to switch to his normal tactics of developing a perpetual money stream off basic software or (2) just kill off this step child he doesn't want anyway.
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OK, that is actually an intelligent point. Hidden in an otherwise crazy comment. Java makes a lot of money for Oracle; it is probably (and by far) the most profitable language in the industry. (It's very hard to make money on a language. Sun was losing many millions a year on Java.)
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Y'all youngsters know *why* Larry bought Sun, right? It had nothing to do with making money. It had everything to do with Larry attempting to go "thermonuclear" on Google/Android for daring to venture into his late, dear friend's area (Jobs...iPhone).
Sorry, that timeline is a bit tricky. The first commercially available Android phone was in 2008, which was a niche phone on the then-smallest US network...and it was trailing behind both WinMo and Blackberry in sales.
It wouldn't be until November 2009, with the Motorola Droid, that the needle started being nudged, and people who wanted a smartphone experience (but weren't going to go to AT&T to get an iPhone) would see Android as a viable alternative. The iPhone, however, was still selling in droves, e
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In 2009 Apple's iPhone had third place market share at 14.4%.
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It had nothing to do with Android. You're a few years off.
why not also bill per customer for your app as wel (Score:2)
why not also bill per customer for your app as well!
Time to leave (Score:2)
In the interim companies should switch to OpenJDK, Coretto or some other open source build. Longer term they should be asking whether Java or spinoffs like Graal deserve much of a future when the stewards of it are such dicks.
Does Orcale Want Java to Succeed? (Score:3)
I actually wonder if they are not trying to strangle it at this point.
If my memory of history serves, Oracle acquired Sun in time to stop the open-sourcing the the JDK had they wanted to do so but at the time it was probably seen as a way to preserve value of the ecosystem. Sun had already licensed Java to places like HP, IBM, etc.
I have no idea what the terms of those pre-OSS Java licenses where but my guess would be its likely they would allow those licensees to maintain their own competing forks in perpetuity if they so desired and an uncooperative Oracle would created a balkanized interopperative environment there and destroyed the value proposition of write-once-run-anywhere in Java for ever.
I assume Oracle hoped to extract money from Java on the support side, and enterprise license angle. The patent and API copyright cases have not gone their way. They can't keep the whales inside the paid the use umbrella for long and they know it.
So moves like this are designed to leverage the lockin they have while they have it. Squeeze the victims for as much cash as possible and if they leave the platform fork, shitcan their investment in Java technology more generally, etc Oracle does not care because they know that will take between 3 years and fifteen depending on the who and what and by then they will have got their pound of flesh.
The historical view (Score:2)
For me the salient quote was:
"Messinger didn't explain how the premium JVM would differ [from] the free version, but the premium edition will likely see performance tuning and tie-ins to Oracle's middleware.
With over 600 comments this was a popular topic of conversation with many predicting that this was the beginning of the end of Java. Prescient given the decline in Java's popularity since then.
What a fantastic time to (Score:2)
zero sympathy (Score:2)
you picked a language that you thought would save you time and money.
but this is oracle. shouldn't you have migrated away from them years ago?
you have only yourself to blame if you still use this crap.
(I used to work for sun many years ago. sun was great, but oracle was a piece of shit to work for).
its like the NY repubs that are 'shocked' that santos was a professional liar. really - shocked that you voted in an R and he's the biggest liar of all time? yeah, you have only yourself to blame for voting f
QL (Score:5, Interesting)
I was part of bringing Oracle into the City of Calgary, now a solid, multi-multi-million-dollar customer for 22 years. The IT department wasn't even looking at SQL in 1991, they were dedicated take-the-mainframe-from-my-cold-dead-hands IBM fanatics still, dedicated to ADABAS. (I recall them trying to flog ADABAS for Windows on us years later, when the virtues of client/server were abundantly clear. It was a kicking-and-screaming conversion.)
What forced the issue was GIS, the project to move our maps from proprietary CAD files (1 per square mile, per layer) to a single contiguous database with all layers. The only GIS products all depended on Oracle, so it wasn't even a shopping project.
Big bureaucracies love a single-product solution, so although PeopleSoft had non-Oracle possibilities some years later, we were long since all-Oracle for GIS and other projects, so Oracle nailed down a hapless customer unable to change without unthinkable transition costs. And we were already inured to Oracle licensing, which was re-tailored every year to be sure there was no way out. "Named users"? "Project Users"? Department-covering licenses? It didn't matter how you framed your usage, Oracle would simply shift their rules to ensure you paid thousands of dollars per year per database user. And then IT got all kinds of overhead-server-admin costs that showed up in other places, in their bill. We were simply sheep being sheared, no way off Maggie's Farm. Some of those thousands-per-year users were on the database for minutes per day, at $10/minute.
After 20 years of it, 2012, I discovered PostGIS, which is just PostgreSQL with their GIS module attached - creates a new data-type, the "geometry", a data structure that can hold points, lines, linestrings, polygons,etc) I had spent that 20 years putting 15,000 kilometres, some 200,000 pipes, in all three networks (water, wastewater, drainage) into the water database, a hundred and some tables, node/link network connectivity, the works.
And I found, to astonishment, that if I created a mirror database in PostGIS, which had more and better tools (loathed Oracle's PL/SQL, wrote huge plain SQL statements to avoid it, did the inescapably procedural analyses in Perl - but PostGIS, wow, it had programming tools....anyway...)
- I could port the Oracle data to PostGIS. By script. Every night. Flawlessly. If the freeware tools that did that hadn't been adequate, there were very affordable companies that make their business to get you from Oracle to Postgres.
The ESRI GIS worked just as well with PostGIS as it did with Oracle. So, for that matter, did the new "QGIS" freeware product. I was able to retire with a copy of my whole map - on a laptop. The IT department was still refusing to create mere department level ESRI map servers, everything had to go on the big corporate server - not just because they STILL had a mainframe mentality, but because Oracle licensing would have killed them if they'd created 20 departmental servers so we could all mess about with map copies and experiments that didn't take 9 months of permission slips and project approvals. I did more useful experiments on the laptop than I could on a million dollars worth of servers, Oracle, and ESRI licenses. (Some of the maps, for big fans of sewer maps, are at brander.ca )
I go on at this length to establish a bit of cred as at least a "mid-size" database. Yes, lots of folks on slashdot who can rave about the ability to put 100-terabyte database across 8 disk drives; where my little 12GB, 100-table, few-million-record product is "small". But it's bigger than a whole lot of well-sheared Oracle customers out there are running - at least in any one project.
And I found the free stuff simply wasn't inferior in any way. The Oracle scam is one of the world's great rackets, simply skimming money off the economy and into investor pockets, part of why most (non-investor-class) people can't have nice things. I couldn't even have a nice map.
Re: (Score:1)
I don't know if you are still into this stuff, but GraphDBs are a great tool to do such mapping for relationships nowadays.
Re: (Score:2)
Not really specialized for physical, municipal network analysis - which is wise, because we need VERY little network analysis, really. There was much talk when GIS came in, about how we'd be able to trace contaminants upstream or downstream, model flows and consumption, etc. Over the next 20 years, almost none of this was requested, it didn't come up much - so seldom that the contaminants guys would be re-learning the app every time the contamination wasn't dead-obvious (the fat is coming from the KF
Stop using Java (Score:2)
How about stop using Java? I seem to recall there are other, and better, languages available these days...
Oracle P/E is 28:1 (Score:2)
OR
Another possibility is this licensing will shift revenue from the Salesforce side of the house to the Java side of the house.