Oracle's Java Pricing Brews Bitter Taste, Subscribers Spill Over To OpenJDK (theregister.com) 49
Lindsay Clark reports via The Register: Only 14 percent of Oracle Java subscribers plan to stay on Big Red's runtime environment, according to a study following the introduction of an employee-based subscription model. At the same time, 36 percent of the 663 Java users questioned said they had already moved to the employee-based pricing model introduced in January 2023. Shortly after the new model was implemented, experts warned that it would create a significant price hike for users adopting it. By July, global tech research company Gartner was forecasting that those on the new subscription package would face between two and five times the costs compared with the previous usage-based model.
As such, among the 86 percent of respondents using Oracle Java SE who are currently moving or plan to move all or some of their Java applications off Oracle environments, 53 percent said the Oracle environment was too expensive, according to the study carried out by independent market research firm Dimensional Research. Forty-seven percent said the reason for moving was a preference for open source, and 38 percent said it was because of uncertainty created by ongoing changes in pricing, licensing, and support. [...]
To support OpenJDK applications in production, 46 percent chose a paid-for platform such as Belsoft Liberica, IBM Semeru, or Azul Platform Core; 45 percent chose a free supported platform such as Amazon Corretto or Microsoft Build of OpenJDK; and 37 percent chose a free, unsupported platform. Of the users who have already moved to OpenJDK, 25 percent said Oracle had been significantly more expensive, while 41 percent said Big Red's licensing had made it somewhat more expensive than the alternative. The survey found three-quarters of Java migrations were completed within a year, 23 percent within three months.
As such, among the 86 percent of respondents using Oracle Java SE who are currently moving or plan to move all or some of their Java applications off Oracle environments, 53 percent said the Oracle environment was too expensive, according to the study carried out by independent market research firm Dimensional Research. Forty-seven percent said the reason for moving was a preference for open source, and 38 percent said it was because of uncertainty created by ongoing changes in pricing, licensing, and support. [...]
To support OpenJDK applications in production, 46 percent chose a paid-for platform such as Belsoft Liberica, IBM Semeru, or Azul Platform Core; 45 percent chose a free supported platform such as Amazon Corretto or Microsoft Build of OpenJDK; and 37 percent chose a free, unsupported platform. Of the users who have already moved to OpenJDK, 25 percent said Oracle had been significantly more expensive, while 41 percent said Big Red's licensing had made it somewhat more expensive than the alternative. The survey found three-quarters of Java migrations were completed within a year, 23 percent within three months.
I kicked them to curb years ago. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I kicked them to curb years ago. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's for people who work for a company that loves paying for middling quality support and security updates and will sign a long term support contract.
But I suspect Canonical will sign a long-term support contract for OpenJDK. so possibly worth checking out to anyone that has a burning need for paying for support.
Re:I kicked them to curb years ago. (Score:4, Insightful)
> a company that loves paying for middling quality support and security updates
They are only paying for someone to blame so they don't get fired.
They will tell you otherwise, of course.
Is that still a thing? (Score:4, Informative)
I didn't realize there were still fools who purchased Java from Oracle - or anything at all really: I had to deal with Oracle at the previous company I worked for, and predatory doesn't even begin to describe their business practices...
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I didn't realize there were still fools who purchased Java from Oracle
It's way too easy... You just have 1 computer at your company with Java on it, and they send you a bill for (Price multiplied by Number of Employees of your company). Perhaps you have this one-off app you need Java Webstart 1.7 for, Or you're testing a solution, and the vendor bundled it, or directed your engineer to get the JRE from Java.com. You just need 1 copy someone downloaded "free" from the internet on 1 computer so
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> thanks to the wonders of EULAs in 2024
Not if the employee is not an authorized contract signer.
Imagine a clerk at Home Depot selling you the whole company for $10.
Oracle could get damages for copyright but it's likely to be hard to prove.
Don’t use it (Score:1, Flamebait)
Don’t use Java, use Python instead. The other day we were hiring a dev, I asked him to list the disadvantages of Python over Java. He just stared at me blank. “You’re hired!” I said.
Re: Don’t use it (Score:2)
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Speed.
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Re:Don’t use it it's good for (Score:2)
Re:Don’t use it (Score:5, Informative)
I asked him to list the disadvantages of Python over Java.
A big one is that Python breaks backward compatibility on a regular basis, where Java's API is full backward compatible all the way back to the beginning. This advantage cannot be overstated, and puts Java WAY ahead of most other languages. I have Java programs I wrote back in the mid 1990's that still run in unmodified binary form.
Our lives are too short to rewrite our programs over and over and over again. I used to be fanatically devoted to Qt during the 3.x years, but completely abandoned it when 4.x hit. It took a year to convert my sole mission-critical Qt 3.x program to Qt 4.x, after which I quit Qt and went back to Java for desktop programs.
That being said, the desktop program paradigm is quickly losing its luster, and there is no equivalent web development language that honors backward compatibility the way Java does. Too bad Java is a non-starter for web development (I've tried, and it really, really sucks for web programming).
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First you talk about Python, then you talk about Qt. Qt's breaking of the API between major versions is not the same thing as Python making breaking changes.
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A breaking change is a breaking change is a breaking change. I'm not following your point.
Re:Don't use it (Score:5, Interesting)
> Java's API is full backward compatible all the way back to the beginning
As someone that had to deal with breaking changes between java versions, multiple times, at different companies over the past 20y, I can tell you this is not really true in practice on larger projects. I think my worst experience was at Netflix when we migrated our datacenters from IBM PPC to Intel and from Java 5 to 6 (we were starting to use AWS for the new streaming business in parallel). It has been a tad better after that but I would not call it smooth sailing.
And yes I was talking about running the already compiled bytecode, compiling from source has even more backward compatibility issues.
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It sounds like the codebase was using API's that were recommended to not be used. There are certain parts of Java that come with a, "Don't use this, as it is not supported and may be removed" warning. I've used Java since version 1.x (1.2, I think), and have never had to change a single line of desktop code in any project I have ever written. Do you remember any of the code that you had to modify?
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In one of the updates, our codebase was definitely using undocumented crypto APIs, that were explicitly removed in that java update.
In the other cases, I can't recall but most likely it was a problem on one of the frameworks we used such as Tomcat, Spring Boot, etc...
A quick lookup shows an outdated list of known java 11 upgrade issues with the Jenkins project:
https://wiki.jenkins.io/JENKIN... [jenkins.io]
Anyhow, I don't really work with java code these days, to me it is mostly painful memories, but good for you it it s
Java's _do_ change. Read the release notes. (Score:4, Informative)
Just review the "Removed Features & Options" in the JDK 21 Release Notes. https://www.oracle.com/java/te... [oracle.com].
The release notes don't always capture everything. We had a production issue a few months ago because of a change that wasn't clearly (*) documented, had to dig into the JDK code to figure out what was going on. (*) The change was documented in the commit history but didn't make the release notes.
So... yeah... they do change.
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Literally once in its 33 years, the transition from 2 to 3 is not "regularly".
For reference, there have been backwards breaking changes in Java too.
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if that wasn't a joke, if he had any clue he would have excused himself politely, immediately left the interview and noticeably sighed on his way out.
but i guess it was a joke, right? just ... it isn't really funny and doesn't make much sense as the meat of a comment on a forum without more context ... so ... u trollin', brah?
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100% serious. Though in hindsight I probably should have asked if he knew how to code. Although, he's still better than the A+ certified guy.
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Pay real wages, get real help.
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I don't know enough about Python to know all of its limitations, but as far as I can tell it doesn't have any answer to Java Beans. If you're writing a web-based system that needs to be horizontally scalable, beans provide that with almost no extra effort. Simply put an annotation above your class and store all state information in the data objects you pass to your methods and the bean handles the rest. There's
Loose 14%, get a big bonus as an Oracle manager (Score:2)
Who cares about these cheap shits not willing to pay for Oracle's magnificent runtime?
The overall revenue would increase because of the stupid fucks who could not move to Openjava quickly enough to cancel their subscription.
Or at least in 2023 so pocket your big fat bonus for 2023!
Can someone that pays for Java please comment... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can someone that pays for Java please comment.. (Score:4, Informative)
I am curious what the benefits are for paying Oracle (or anyone else) a support cost?
Oracle doesn't expect Joe developer to pony up for a license to make a Minecraft or whatever. Oracle has institutional customers that will pay them despite the lack of any meaningful technological value; governments, large corporate entities, etc. They pay because Java is embedded into Oracle's stack (database, application servers, etc.) and they're expected to rigorously comply with software vendor license terms. It's rent seeking.
If you have developers, developing apps, what does the support get you?
Nothing. There are some Oracle JDK exclusive capabilities, but there are analogs in the open source world for most if not all of that. You can report bugs to OpenJDK just a easily as you could Oracle if you had a support contract, and the outcome will be indistinguishable.
You're not missing anything important. When you need a baseline Java stack the best choice today is probably Amazon Corretto. If you find that is somehow inadequate because you've ventured into some exotic corner of the JDK world, you're the problem and you should reevaluate your expectations: you're likely using the wrong language.
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the best choice today is probably Amazon Corretto
I wholeheartedly suport this claim. Not only are Amazon and AWS arguably the largest users of Java on the planet, its inventor, James Gosling, had worked for AWS for seven years.
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It's not like I can use Dalvik or ART on my server, though.
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Very much a corner case, but I did pay for a JRE almost 20 years ago when I made a Java application for PocketPC. Sun didn't support that particular platform, and I bought a licence for IBM's J9.
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Which is why Oracle was willing to throw huge sums of money and huge numbers of billable lawyer hours at Google over Android.
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Because developers are commodity employees and can't be expected to understand or maintain the environment. Meanwhile, Oracle has "experts" to get you unstuck if there's a big problem. /s
It doesn't matter how bad or useless support is, if the comparison is between software that has support and software that doesn't, support always seems to win.
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When Sun still existed the advantage was JIT optimisation, which made a huge improvement in performance, especially on Solaris. When Oracle took over that stagnated and the IBM became the go to JRE for Intel platforms.
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I am curious what the benefits are for paying Oracle (or anyone else) a support cost? If you have developers, developping apps, what does the support get you? It seems counterintuitive since the open jdk is free and techincally gets updates. I guess if you embed a java engine in your product, where you may need customizations of the JVM, or some odd patch.
The value is that if you have an issue, technical or otherwise, you have just one business entity specifically designated to tell you, "Read the fucking documentation, loser." As opposed to using an open/free run-time, where there's countless internet forums telling you, "Read the fucking documentation, loser." It's a great comfort to management types to have a specific person designated as their morale destroyers. The bigger and worse, the better. And it's tough to beat Oracle on that front. Unless you bri
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That was good to read! As far as I'm concerned, you just won the internet for a day.
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That was good to read! As far as I'm concerned, you just won the internet for a day.
Thank you. I pretend to be an author in my spare time. Sometimes it slips out during casual conversation.
I have an idea (Score:2)
I have a better idea. (Score:2)
Only code in a language where you can get support from the people that invented the language. You want to use JAVA, you should make sure you have SUN support on-deck.
Oh, wait . . . there is no SUN anymore. Please remember that Oracle only bought SUN so that they could have the hardware to make hardware database appliances. They meant to dead-end MySQL (which was mortally wounded just because Oracle bought it), they had no intention of keeping JAVA around but couldn't find a good way to kill it quickly w
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Does that mean you should stop programming in C++ because AT&T and Bell Labs (where it was invented) no longer exist?
Oracle's Cloud Strategy? (Score:2)
2. Make running apps on-prem much more expensive than the cloud
3. Get all apps migrated to Oracle Cloud
4. Fleece captive audience
My Experience (Score:2)