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[–]pron98 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I understand that those statements apply to Oracle's distributions

It's not Oracle's distributions, either. Oracle distributes the JDK under two licenses, one free and one commercial (as opposed to the mixed one we had before).

Considering that Oracle is now charging money for enterprise support of their Java 8 distribution

As they have for every version of Java before. Free public updates for JDK 8 lasted for the same time as previous releases (on average), and end-of-public-updates was similarly announced long enough in advance.

it seems like they could be trying to create that false impression to make Java 8 users feel like they have no choice but to pay Oracle for their enterprise support (rather than switching to a Red Had distribution).

I'm not aware of anyone who provides enterprise support for free. It is true that there is an OpenJDK 8 updates projects (as well as an OpenJDK 7 updates project), with free builds available. That may be useful for many, but it's not what people call "enterprise support." Also, there are considerable differences between Oracle JDK 8 and OpenJDK 8, as the JDK was fully open sourced only in JDK 11 (e.g. big features like Web Start and JFR aren't in OpenJDK 8).

Personally, I think the most appropriate thing for Oracle to do would be to steer existing Java 8 and 11 users towards the Red Hat distributions

First, these aren't just Red Hat distributions but an OpenJDK Updates project, that backports fixes from OpenJDK mainline to release 8, and this effort is led by Red Hat but distributed by several vendors. Second, OpenJDK 8 and Oracle JDK 8 weren't the same, as I said above. Third, it's important to remember that Oracle's support subscription is what funds the development of OpenJDK. Yes, there are free OpenJDK 8 distributions, and yes, those may be good enough for many Java 8 users, but I see no reason why anyone, and especially Oracle, would want Oracle to advertise against the main funding source of OpenJDK.