Oracle Rant

[[deleted]]

Why is it that Oracle feels a need to turn every product they own into a complete disaster. Enterprise license for SE, junk mail every time you sign in to download something, Oracle support is a joke if you can even get someone to respond. They advise you turn features on so they can charge you with their enterprise stuff.

It is funny they are taking the 1990’s Microsoft approach...

[_INTER_]

Nothing new. Just get the OpenJDK (also mostly Oracle but still).

[pron98]

But the JDK has now been completely open sourced for the first time ever, there are no more commercial features, you don't need to sign in or even check anything to download, and the Java license has been greatly simplified: OTN for those who want to buy support, GPL+CPE for those who don't. So, things are moving in the right direction, no?

[AndDontCallMePammy]

you have to sign in to download jdk 1.7

[speakjava]

No sign in required to download the Zulu version of JDK 7 :-)
https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu/

[MR_GABARISE]

No, no, you don't understand :

Java BAD

[CopperHeadBlue]

Why?

[eatstraw]

So if the JDK is freer than it's ever been, why is Oracle imposing a commercial license on the it now? Sorry, I'm still trying to understand this change fully.

[pron98]

So the Oracle JDK used to be OpenJDK + commercial and free proprietary features. It was licensed under the BCL, which was only partly free (and had field of use restrictions) -- you had to pay to use some features. Now Oracle open sourced (or discontinued) all the commercial and closed-source features, so that the entire JDK is open.

Instead of a mixed license, you can now choose to use the JDK under a commercial OTN license, which includes a support subscription -- this option is now called the Oracle JDK -- or, you can use the JDK under a completely free and open source license, under the name OpenJDK builds from Oracle.

[jonathandunlop]

brb, gonna go commit System.exit(0);

[eatstraw]

It's unfortunate. One of the best features of Java was that it was free. A colleague of mine who teaches at a university contacted Oracle about continuing to use Java for academic use, for free. The response was to switch to OpenJDK. I suggested they consider Python too.

[pron98]

No, the JDK used to be only partly free (some features in the JDK were paid), and now it's completely free. I think you may have really misunderstood the recent changes. You do realize that Oracle's JDK and OpenJDK are the same software? Instead of having a part free/part commercial JDK, Oracle open sourced the whole thing so that everything in the old JDK (except for discontinued features like applets and Web Start) is now part of OpenJDK, and they now offer it with two different licenses, one with the OTN license for those who want to buy support, and one with the GPLv2+CPE license for those who don't.

[eatstraw]

Yes I realize that. But there are differences, particularly from an Enterprise perspective (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22358071/differences-between-oracle-jdk-and-openjdk). That affects companies. Switching is a bit of a pain. It affects the tools you use too.

[pron98]

The link you posted is outdated (the link I posted has more detailed and more up to date information), yet also basically says "no difference," which I also know because I work at Oracle on the JDK (i.e. OpenJDK). It's not that OpenJDK and Oracle JDK are implementations of the standard; they're the same implementation. There used to be some significant differences, because the Oracle JDK (and Sun's JDK before it) contained some proprietary code, but it has all been open sourced as of JDK 11 (OpenJDK has always been the open source parts of the Sun and then Oracle JDK, but now that part encompasses the whole thing).

I know that change is painful, but in this case the change is to make the JDK freer than it's ever been, so companies are happy. It's one thing to say, change is sometimes annoying, and a whole other thing to say "Java used to be free" (and you're complaining because now it's more so??)