UK Universities Sign $13.3 Million Deal To Avoid Oracle Java Back Fees (theregister.com) 29
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million pounds ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023." Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. "The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023," the notice said.
The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was "a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments." However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.
"For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has," Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. "Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model." Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.
The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was "a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments." However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.
"For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has," Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. "Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model." Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.
This should be a lesson. (Score:5, Insightful)
This should really be a lesson to all the universities to stop using Oracle's products.
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Why did they sign a deal instead of just switching to OpenJDK. We have a big project and we did the switch and there were zero problems with it. It is the exactly same product, but Oracle has some additional packages on top of it. If you don't use those rare packages, you can use OpenJDK just fine.
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Why did they sign a deal instead of just switching to OpenJDK. We have a big project and we did the switch and there were zero problems with it. It is the exactly same product, but Oracle has some additional packages on top of it. If you don't use those rare packages, you can use OpenJDK just fine.
A few reasons come to mind:
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Should be a lesson to EVERYONE really to avoid Oracle by all means.
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Not just universities. This should be a lesson to everyone. I stopped using Java and Oracle products about 10 years ago. Most Oracle products have good alternatives. I am constantly surprised that Oracle is still doing well financially and people are still using their products.
Nice college you have there... (Score:3, Funny)
be a shame if something were to happen to it.
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Oracle defines employees as temporary, agents, con (Score:4, Interesting)
Oracle defines employees as temporary, agents, contractors???? So any working for oracle in any way should sue for full rights as an employee?
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Its this thing that I assume is screwing up the universities. Universities usually have giant pools of people working in various capacities, from admin full timers, to academics, t ground staff, professors, and more often then not a huge number of postgrads not exactly on the payroll but still working on research projects whilst living off scholarships and grants. Even a small university could have upwards of 5000 employees, contractors and postgrads.
I *dont* understand why universities would tolerate this
Re:Oracle defines employees as temporary, agents, (Score:5, Informative)
I can take a stab at this.
First, it is surprisingly difficult to verifiably eliminate a piece of software from a large environment. We went through this exact exercise a couple years back because we didn't want to pay Oraclegeld. The first 90% is easy. But then you're dealing with Java running on weird devices that are difficult, expensive, or both to replace. And employees who for strange reasons try to keep a copy. And vended applications where swapping the JVM voids your support contract. And all sorts of other weird situations.
And second, these are universities. Schools in general are not exactly famous for having an iron grip on their computing resources. Their IT capabilities in general are different than businesses because their focus is different. And structurally, there are frequently organizational silos and redundant departments with their own budgets for historical reasons, so I imagine even trying to inventory all the computers a school "owns" is can be a challenge in some places. (This is certainly true in the US, I'm guessing English schools are subject to similar pressures.)
So it doesn't surprise me at all if they just couldn't pull it together. Even with centralized administrative control of our machines, it was a multi-month and surprisingly costly effort for us.
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Then make a team of people and give them audit and authority to replace oracle software. No exceptions.
Re:Oracle defines employees as temporary, agents, (Score:4)
You can't retrospectively change a license in the UK. Therefore, anything installed or, for that matter, downloaded before Oracle changed the licensing terms in April 2019 is immune to their bullying. US laws don't apply in the UK.
As regards the different departments, you, as your IT admin for your department, get a stringent mandate (been there working in a UK University as an IT admin) to report on all your Java usage and remove anything before April 2019 and switch to something else if you really must continue to use Java.
This would not just be a Java thing; we have had similar mandates about VirtualBox and OracleDB, though we never used the latter in the first place. Some of the central "corporate" databases are still using Oracle, I believe, though I understand exit roots are planned, may even have been implemented by now.
Re: Oracle defines employees as temporary, agents, (Score:2)
Hey, jabuzz.
Did you mean "anything after 2019", rather than "before"?
Otherwise I'm not following you.
If I'm not understanding what you were trying to convey, please explain.
P.S. I work for a U.S. university. Our IT groups ran some kind of scanning tools on all our network drives to look for newer builds of Java (either JREs orJDKs), back when the licensing changed. Our affiliated hospital group (we're an academic health center, too) did the same. The hospital side also recently migrated from their entrenche
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The Oracle JVMs might run the administrative infrastructure of the organization.
And not the research projects of the students and post docs.
Like HR stuff, as in payrolls and planning courses or what ever.
13million does nto sound like a lot of money. So it most certainly is not about, uh, that idiotic post doc did download a JCM from Oracle and not from an open source source??!
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Oracle defines employees as temporary, agents, contractors???? So any working for oracle in any way should sue for full rights as an employee?
Oracle isn't in a licensing contract with itself.
They define employee for themselves by the correct legal definition.
Only in the java JRE licensing contract do they redefine all other companies "employee" definition.
That's because when you use the JRE, they don't license it per-user, they charge per-employee.
$15 per employee per month is a much larger number than how many network accounts we have, which is a far larger number than JRE installs we have.
They want to inflate the monthly price according to how
PSA: Use OpenJDK...everyone does! (Score:4)
Use OpenJDK. It's fully compatible and great and will outperform anything you do in Go, Python, C#, or JavaScript. It sucks that Oracle is engaging in this stupidity...but...eh, the world sucks. Your life doesn't have to...use OpenJDK.
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Sun handled it quite well, it was back then a better platform than c# IMO. This is fully on Oracle. Oracle destroyed Suns HW business and Java.
Why?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
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Sun fuckup is why we have PHP and Python (Score:2)
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That's a good point, I had forgotten about the distribution issues early on, you're right.
Oracle Extortion (c) (Score:2)
Re:Oracle Extortion (c) (Score:4, Insightful)
And Oracle should be charged for their business practices under RICO legislation.
2023 is 'historic' now? (Score:2)
Wouldn't have guessed.
Oracle is a cancer (Score:2)
Best to avoid anything that gets you close that terrible company.
proprietary plumbing (Score:2)
Most likely, this licensing came as an add-on to the larger licensing of Oracle database, ERP and other products.
If cops, vampires, or Oracle ask "May I come in" (Score:1)
... the correct answer is always "No".
Death Knells of the complanent (Score:1)
Broadcom has recently started showing the same traits, jacking up the costs of their recently purchased virtualization platform while they can before the product becomes a true commodity that cannot generate revenue.
Now it sounds like Oracle is following the same playbook. Oracle's Java platfor
Prediction (Score:2)
Java is one of those languages I used to use a lot but don't anymore because I shifted to a new orbit. So it is hard for me to work up a dudgeon over Oracle making money on it.
Having now been steeped in 2-3 eventful years of AI coding, what I think is these kinds of deals/services are going to die out. If I had a code base in Java and I didn't want to pay license for it, I would just have Claude or some even-better-at-coding LLM model simply rewrite the project, module by module, into C++ or Rust or som
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I agree with you but the technical inertia in many companies, particularly if they are not tech-centric, is enormous.
I worked at a company for a couple of years where all of the backend code was Java (which I hate, but it paid good money). And they had a truly gigantic Oracle database. The license fees between Java and the database must have been staggering but they were terrified of moving to any form of tech that might rock the boat in any way and disturb the inner workings, much of which had been written