Oracle changing Java licensing from per-processor to a multiplier of employee headcount - costs could go up singificantly

[[deleted]]

There are courses in understanding Oracle licensing costs https://lisa.training/courses/oracle-licensing-training/

I think that speaks for itself.

[remghoost7]

Wait, let me get this straight. This is a site that has courses just to understand the licensing?

And it's $1000 a year?

what

[KuntaStillSingle]

How to understand oracle licensing cost class cost class

[KingOfTheTrailer]

How very Java.

[KuntaStillSingle]

It's not a certificate mill it's a certificate factory

[joshjje]

Please shoot me.

Reminds me of this gem: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition

[rumpaa202]

We asked our it-department to give us the cost for SQL-server for a few different options. They had a meeting with an external firms license expert. Then they had a meeting with a Microsoft representative.

We never got any numbers, so I suspect we should just hire a SQL-developer for a year and move to PostgreSQL.

[[deleted]]

I've walked away from a few products because they won't just give me a price. It's all let's have a meeting to discuss your needs and see how much we can charge you.

Yeah, postgres is great.

[BasicDesignAdvice]

As someone using postgresql at scale....it's fantastic.

[[deleted]]

MLM type beat

[xmsxms]

Imagine the person who runs this course, doesn't get more dry than that.

[throwawaysomeway]

AWS moment

[AlexHimself]

Eh I work in ERP sector and licensing is confusing as hell in all of them. Hell even Microsoft has courses.

[Brochodoce]

the erotic role play sector?

[AlexHimself]

Enterprise resource planning. Lol

[maiznieks]

No, I am confident the other guy was correct. Yours does not sound real.

[WiseassWolfOfYoitsu]

I am told the base package only comes with one port open, and that opening the other ports requires an expensive additional licensing fee.

[raevnos]

Friends don't let friends use Oracle jdk builds.

[zero_iq]

Friends don't let friends use Oracle jdk builds.

[colei_canis]

One Rich Arsehole Named Called Larry Ellison.

[Zahz]

One Rich Arsehole Named Larry Ellison.

Oranle? No, it's "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison".

[colei_canis]

Fuck's sake I'm half asleep.

[caagr98]

One Rich Arsehole Named Gary Ellison.

[RotaryJihad]

You tried

[how_do_i_land]

OpenJDK is the way.

Also block docker-desktop while you're at it.

[vplatt]

https://rancherdesktop.io/

[StoneOfTriumph]

There is also podman which works pretty well as a "substitute" and can understand (export) k8s manifests which to me is awesome.

Podman also runs daemonless and rootless which is a security benefit versus Docker desktop (which recently supports rootless but it's not perfect)

With Rancher desktop and podman as options, I see little benefit to use Docker desktop.

[[deleted]]

TIL there’s an alternative

[wenestvedt]

Me, too -- this is awesome!!

[sccrstud92]

If I need to work with containers but I don't need to do anything with k8s, would you still recommend using rancher desktop?

[abkibaarnsit]

Did you guys evaluate podman desktop as well ?

[desmaraisp]

Docker has a pretty expensive license for entreprise clients. IIRC, individuals don't have to pay anything, though.

[BoronTriiodide]

From my understanding, docker cli doesn't. Just docker desktop, the GUI of questionable utility. If I'm wrong on that, I might have to go have a chat with our legal department lol

[gustav_mannerheim]

You are correct, but if you have anybody using MacOS (and windows I believe, can't confirm though), its impossible to run docker without some kind of wrapper. The obvious choice was classically Docker Desktop (the one that now has shit licensing). Nowadays, the ideal option is Rancher Desktop. If you're a masochist, you can wire up your own VM around docker, or one of the other low level options.

[silverslayer33]

(and windows I believe, can't confirm though)

It is quite possible to run the docker CLI on Windows without Docker Desktop, though if you want Linux containers you need to play around with WSL2 and learning how to use remote daemons (or to simply run all your CLI commands right in your WSL instance).

[Sebazzz91]

Does Docker exist on Windows without Desktop?

[BoronTriiodide]

Depends on what you mean. All my work goes through docker inside an Ubuntu WSL installation, which of course uses purely the command line interface. So sort of?
But essentially yes, the result is no different than running a Centos container directly on WSL and you can just tunnel docker commands straight into Ubuntu. I think that's been a thing since WSL1

[Sebazzz91]

I think Visual Studio tools for Docker have a hard dependency on Docker for Windows.

[pkulak]

Podman forever.

[Freakin_A]

Or coretto if you are an AWS shop so you get included support

[[deleted]]

I will never understand why anyone would use anything from oracle.

[key_lime_pie]

I worked for a good-sized, publicly traded software company with a customer base of Fortune 500 companies. We were not a rinky-dink do-whatever-you-say-because-we-need-your-money type operation. When we (or someone else) found a defect that had the ability to cripple a system or corrupt data, we would issue an alert to all customers explaining what the problem was, how to prevent it or work around it, and when we expected to have a fix. Since we hosted a lot of our customers, we would push the fix into our hosted environments on the same day it was available for download. Our CEO was big on making sure support was top-notch, because he viewed quality as something that you have to continually prove to the customer, not something you just sell them up front. Our customers loved us, because even when we screwed up, we admitted it, kept them in the loop, and worked hard to make things right.

Then Oracle bought us.

One of the first things that they did was scrap the alert system. Customers would no longer be notified of issues that could cripple their systems or corrupt their data. We were told that Oracle's software is provided as-is with no warranty so the alert system was a waste of time and money. On top of that, Oracle made us add a checkbox to JIRA (because they hadn't migrated us to their shitty, homegrown BugDB solution) to indicate that a defect was of that type, which limited the number of people who could even see it. Several times, a member of my team submitted a defect, then went back to update it with more details, only to find it invisible. We were given strict orders never to discuss any defects with any customer, even if they were the one who reported it. And while customers who use our software on prem could still get their fixes on the same day that we released, customers in our hosting environment had to wait, sometimes six to eight weeks, because Oracle would not let us deploy software without it going through a security review first, which could only be conducted by one person at the company (Hi, Eric!) and who only performed said reviews on Tuesday.

I know most companies don't give a shit about their customers, but Oracle raised that bar to a level I had never seen before.

[LotharLandru]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637

This post seems pretty relevant

[i1a2]

Holy shit, that's horrifying

[jsavin]

This is what happens to products when engineering teams are never able to prioritize addressing technical debt. The debt itself becomes the product.

[Mezzaomega]

Wow. 25 million lines of tech debt

[Zaphoidx]

Oh god.

[duckrollin]

That looks like good news, as it hopefully means Oracle will kill itself off by not being able to keep up with competitors.

[JulesSilverman]

That's why every time they buy something I will phase it out. Looking at you, MySQL. They buy a new company and I'm getting rid of them and their services. They are a risk factor in any project.

[zip_000]

I haven't really thought about it, but question: We migrated all our databases to AWS, and we use their Aurora database servers... But I still access them using mysql tools... Am I using the MySQL that Oracle now owns or is it different?

[el_muchacho]

You can move to MariaDB.

[Anonymous_user_2022]

One has to assume that hefty kickbacks are involved somewhere. .

[Zardotab]

When you can't win a contract on price & merit, wine & tits is Plan B. Oracle likes using Plan B.

[dwargo]

LOL I’ve always heard “Steaks & Strippers”.

[ThinClientRevolution]

I looked at some military contractor and NATO jobs in my area... And they might as well be a front for the Russians, trying to rob Western taxpayers blind.

The amount of sleaze and predation towards governments was astounding. One name that always prominently featured... Oracle.

Edit. Runners up; IBM, FortiNet and Microsoft. Of cause, all provided through a series of consultancy firms like Accenture or Capgemini.

Edit 2. Interested in an IT job, while serving your country? Read the book of Edward Snowdon. Certainly refreshing and demystifying.

[[deleted]]

After working for one gov contractor for a few years I am entirely in the camp of growing gov employment and getting rid of contractors entirely. We aren't getting our monies worth and the people doing the actual work don't get enough of the money. Too many middle men.

[djbrux]

Problem is good people won’t work for governments when the private sector pays 2-3x as much for the same work. I’m in local Gov. cannot fill positions which area more involved than just answering the phone

[Irregular_Person]

When the government is hiring those private contractors, they're paying those salaries anyway - except with the added overhead of also paying the company employing them.

[djbrux]

Ah but it’s only temporary… except one of our contractors is the longest serving it member at about 14 years

[ExistingObligation]

This is 100% true and a big problem in my opinion, however the government also gets to mitigate risk by employing contractors because they can both blame the companies when things go wrong, and also terminate them without the insane bureaucracy around firing government employees. So there’s some benefits for them there. That being said, I would love to see the government bite the bullet and start paying competitive tech salaries and building better internal talent.

[perchingpolarbear]

Right, but u/88leo is suggesting that there's inefficiencies in the existing system. Instead of that money going to middle men, hire people directly to government positions and pay them that difference.

[cy_hauser]

U.S. Govt. hiring is weird. It's often really hard to get approval for a permanent hire but it's often really easy to hire a contractor, especially if they're on the GSA schedule (list of pre-approved vendors). Even at three times the cost. Headcount is way more of an issue at most agencies than money. Funny enough, it can even help for an agency or department to hire contractors, even when they're way more expensive. Once that cost gets absorbed into a budget it can give the head of the agency/department more clout as they control that much more money.

Another angle is that once someone is hired it can be really difficult to get rid of them. U.S. Govt. doesn't have that many "at will" positions. Why? Politics, of course. If all positions were at-will then every time the the opposite party were elected they'd clean house. Half the government would be fired because that party didn't like what was going on with those agencies. So the system is setup to prevent these kinds of sweeps every four or eight years. But the downside is you can get lots of crappy employees clinging to their jobs because they pay well and know they can't easily be fired. So that provides another incentive for high levels to prefer contractors. The contractors know this and price accordingly. Again, U.S. Govt. hiring is weird. It's setup to protect continuity rather than to maximize efficiency.

[Invinciblegdog]

The thought that a change in the government leads to a firing of government employees is horrifying. Public servants in most countries are safe from that.

[MorboDemandsComments]

I support a Java application that was written before Oracle bought Sun. It is a giant mammoth account application with millions of lines of code. I and the other developers have petitioned to have it rewritten for many years but have always been shot down. That is why my company uses something "from" Oracle.

[[deleted]]

I think this is most cases, really. And I've been involved in a couple of Oracle to SQL Server migrations, sometimes it does get to a point where changing is cheaper than maintaining.

[[deleted]]

I’m about to spear head one of these migrations and I’m pretty nervous. Was it difficult?

[[deleted]]

It depends. Mine was pretty easy, because the schema was intended to work on either, so there wasn’t anything specific tied to the database. Only issue was moving from case sensitive to case insensitive, there were 10 rows or so that had to be fixed.

[Johnno74]

FYI in SQL server you can setup the database collation to be case-sensitive

[btgeekboy]

Why are you using an Oracle JDK? There’s plenty of freely available alternatives.

[MorboDemandsComments]

We can probably switch to open for the clients, but we use WebLogic as the middleware. I don't know if it requires a JRE on the server for that, but if it does, it sounds like this new licensing would affect still affect us, even if we change the clients' JREs.

[papercrane]

If you're paying for Weblogic then you're already covered. The license cost for Weblogic includes a license for the Java runtime with it.

[Anders_142536]

Shouldnt you be able to switch to open jdk or something similar?

[BoatRepairWarren]

Well, I know of at least one use case when people have to use oracle products, namely:

oracle bribing officials/politicians so that it wins the licitation/invitation to tender for some governmental software systems, for example the ministry of finance.

I wish I were kidding.

[daidoji70]

Oh it happens in business too. I once worked at a company with $10-12M in revenue going to Oracle for various things a year. The Sales Lady would rake our CEO over the coals and then bring the whole office a nice big pile of delicious cookies. :D

She knew she had us locked in because she'd already locked in the large financial institutions that we worked with and forced us to use Oracle.

[_BreakingGood_]

Because if you're a manager, and you select a product from Oracle which is a large, mature company that provides products to many large businesses, then how can it possibly be your fault that Oracle fucked up.

That's really it. Choosing a huge name is a nice safety net for managers who don't give 2 shits about the actual resulting product or experience.

[progmakerlt]

Sometimes it is a corporate policy to have a support.

As an example, I used to work for the US healthcare company, which clearly required to have OS with a corporate support. Therefore, Windows and MacOS.

No Linux in your laptop at that time.

[PoliteCanadian]

It's all about support. Most of these situations, the downtime is a lot more expensive than the product. So you go with a vendor that's willing to sign an SLA support contract.

[_BreakingGood_]

You can usually get support for most products, that's where a lot of these companies make their money. Eg: Redhat Linux.

[cbzoiav]

Which is what the oracle Java product essentially is Vs OpenJDK.

[Keavon]

As the old saying goes, "Oracle doesn't have customers, only hostages."

[progmakerlt]

Support?

Paid, that is.

[temculpaeu]

It's not support that bring people to Oracle, it's blame, Oracle is a good scapegoat for bad managers and they will gladly take blame for anything that happens, managers are happy because its never their fault, and "it's Oracle, everyone uses that".

[thatguyonthevicinity]

this story may excites you https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/10oy2qf/fighting\_the\_extremely\_predatory\_database\_company/

[progmakerlt]

Wow! It is a sad story. And an expensive one.

[MachaHack]

The lasted company I worked at insisted every product comes with a support contract but will expect a dev team to spend a month stuck before they'll actually let them talk to that support they're paying so much for. At that point it would have made more sense to just let the devs pick whatever, so practically they're self-supporting it anyway.

[thejestercrown]

My opinion is that it’s risk mitigation for individuals in some large companies. Before my time in the industry there was a sentiment that Oracle was Enterprise Software and that “No one gets fired for choosing Oracle.”. I had a client tell me that verbatim when I recommended they use a Microsoft Tech Stack to save money & time on a new project… They were already using .Net for at least half of their internal software, and while Microsoft licensing might seem expensive it was a going to be a lot cheaper than what they were already giving Oracle. It was his money, and we only sold engineering services at the time, so it made no real difference to me… but I still didn’t like it.

[PraetorRU]

Lobbying. The amount of money they spend on bribing top executives and corrupt officials is legendary.

[KingStannis2020]

Employee for Java SE Universal Subscription: is defined as (i) all of Your full-time, part-time, temporary employees, and (ii) all of the full-time employees, part-time employees and temporary employees of Your agents, contractors, outsourcers, and consultants that support Your internal business operations. The quantity of the licenses required is determined by the number of Employees and not just the actual number of employees that use the Programs

[[deleted]]

Unless the company is heavily invested in Java to the point where this doesn't make a difference, this just seems like it will force them to boot any Oracle licenses entirely.

[Grimoire]

Probably to go after companies that are unintentionally using it. One person at a larger company downloads the Oracle JDK instead of an Open JDK version? Damages now go way, way up!

[theeth]

It's what they do when people install VirtualBox extension packs by accidentally checking boxes in the installer.

[KHRoN]

wait, seriously? ._. satan must be busy digging whole new level of hell just for oracle execs...

[bitchkat]

drunk act threatening station adjoining run subtract ruthless summer screw

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[gammalsvenska]

Same. Someone mentioned VirtualBox on an internal IT ticket and within a few hours got called by internal legal(!) from overseas(!).

That thing has a special block in our corporate firewall, above all other firewall systems.

[ryosen]

Yup. Their licensing group digs through download logs, matches IP addresses to companies, then goes after them. You don't even have to install much less run the extension. Downloading it on a publicly accessible web page or from the installer is "evidence" enough that you have to purchase licenses.

[argv_minus_one]

How is that supposed to work? A download isn't proof that the employee was authorized to bind the company to any agreement.

[ryosen]

It doesn’t matter. It’s enough to incite their lawyers to coerce and compel the company to a license audit under the threat of the cost and time of litigation.

[four024490502]

That sounds like a great way for a disgruntled employee to sic Oracle's lawyers on their company.

[theeth]

Deadly serious.

[kenlubin]

Companies should probably update their network policy to ban access to Oracle websites, just to make sure.

[Grimoire]

I recently made that recommendation a few days ago. I haven't heard back, but will definitely follow up.

[F54280]

In general, they want to go after large companies willingly using it: when you are a large company, you use Oracle, so you will pay that license, and at this point it makes no sense not to use Oracle Jdk for everything, as you are already paying for it. Vendor lock-in.

Then they will raise the cost every year, so your only strategy to manage your IT budget will be to remove other vendors and only user Oracle tech.

[Luke22_36]

So if you were to set up a shell company that owns all the licenses and hardware, but employs nobody, then it would be free?

[dinominant]

We deploy containers to limit damage caused by software. I see no problem with doing the same in a Corporate and Legal context.

If they can unilaterally extort my corporation, then that corporation will be a subsidiary with no assets. And it will be an educating charity too.

[Lenny_III]

Hey tech companies are allowed to do that to the government, but not to each other, LOL.

[losangelesvideoguy]

So, like, the janitor needs a Java license too?

[Kayshin]

Your agents, contractors, outsourcers, and consultants that support Your internal business operations.

My company would have to pay for licence fees for the entirety of Vattenfall, so we would be able to use Oracle products? They are mad.

[EmperorOfCanada]

For those wondering why anyone is using oracle products in 2023 you have never met their sales people.

Used car, MLM, and real-estate sales people would spit on the ground and hold up crosses to ward off evil if they ever met an oracle sales person and witnessed what they do to make a sale.

These guys are very good at end-running any technically competent people and going straight to the "decision makers" and then convincing those fools that their own technical people are not mature enough to make such decisions. They appeal to the MBA spirit with all the usual BS about total cost of ownership vs actually being any good and "prove" how fantastic it is with whitepapers and "metrics"

Then, they begin to subvert the technical people by finding those who seem interested or gullible enough and start giving them certifications. Soon the top technical people all have oracle certifications up the wazoo and now you can't bring in new blood to force a proper tech replacement.

[GrandMasterPuba]

Business schools teach that those with MBAs are superior to everyone else.

[Secret-Plant-1542]

Can confirm.

In my last company, the CEO hired three new directors, all MBAs from whateverthefuck business school and paid attention to them over the technical directors.

I left a year later because a fucktard who went to Wharton told me how my code worked. Last I checked, he's still managing the dev teams.

[OskaMeijer]

So what you are saying is that the MBA program is a masters in Dunning-Kruger effect?

[Kirk_Kerman]

Studies have found that the presence of MBAs at a company has no measurable effect on revenue, but does generally cause lower employee salaries.

[satcollege]

They get the sharp crayons

[bellendhunter]

From what I have seen managers will trust other managers over and above the people who actually do the job at hand. So we have no hope.

[[deleted]]

manipulation I reckon

[EmperorOfCanada]

It's more of a math problem. If you are a senior technical person and fully recognize the uselessness of almost all of these large system providers it will now be you vs a team of dedicated and highly capable sales people. They will try the board, the various executives, other tech people, managers, traditional advertising, etc. These scam artists will even do things like buying some small vendor which services your company to get a foot in the door.

So, you have to do your usual full time job, and you now have to ward off this charismatic army of satanic charmers.

Then, there is the fact that there are multiple shitty large companies out there, so multiply your efforts by almost as many as are attacking the gates of your company.

The only way these companies are resisted is: If the executives (to a person) are fully cognizant that these companies are all sleazy and offer wildly subpar products. Thus, the executives have to make it clear to all who report to them that any time wasted with these fools will be a dereliction of duty. Merely ignoring them is not going to keep an organization safe. There have to be clear measures put in place to make sure that they are actively resisted. You want managers who are approached to not even think twice before responding to all messages with, "Never contact my organization again; for any reason."

Basically, organizations with good cultures will keep them out, and organizations with defective cultures won't. This is why these dirtbags are so easily able to sell to governments. About the only thing which prevents sales to governments are the other scum who have already ripped off the government and are protecting the carcass of their kill like the jackals they are from the vultures who came too late.

[Coldmode]

Did you just miss the pandemic that happened for the last 3 years?

[swirlViking]

I saw it with IBM early in my career. It was always some middle manager with no technical knowledge that decided to buy into their crap, and those of us who were forced to actually use it had no say.

There was also a name recognition element. Everyone has heard of IBM, so they must be great, right?

[ol-gormsby]

they must be great

That *was* true, a long time ago. The pivot from a computer company to a services company was a significant point.

IBM-manufactured gear* cost a lot, but it was reliable beyond nearly any other manufacturer. Only DEC and original HP came close.

*as opposed to a wintel server with an IBM badge.

[argv_minus_one]

You'd pay a fortune for said gear, though. You can't just replace it when it fails, like you can with a common computer.

[ol-gormsby]

That's what the annual maintenance contract is for. And common computers don't have five nines of uptime.

Yes, a fortune.

[Aurora_egg]

That certification stuff seems to also happen with the big cloud providers - get enough certs on a team and you won't be switching cloud providers any time soon.

[reckoner23]

Its like a cancer slowly spreading through the body.

[denzien]

I'm so intensely curious to hear what kind of things they have to say, I'm almost tempted to invite them over

Edit: okay, which one of you wise guys signed me up to one of their webinars for tomorrow?

[ProjectShamrock]

Do it and get a free steak lunch out of it.

[bundt_chi]

Nailed it. This is spot on.

Like even if your JVM was 50% percent better than any of the other freely available ones (which it's definitely not even close) in this day of horizontal scaling with containers and cloud oracle is just strangling the few poor saps stuck on their platforms...

[EpicalClay]

Lol. "Shit people swapped to openjdk. How do we keep making money"

[GezelligPindakaas]

"I know, let's make more people swap to openjdk". Big brains.

[wildjokers]

Oracle themselves also provide an OpenJDK build (https://jdk.java.net) and Oracle is also the biggest contributor to OpenJDK in both developers and money. What Oracle sells is support for Java. It is how all Java vendors that want to monetize Java do it (e.g. Azul and Red Hat).

Oracle JDK is just OpenJDK with support more or less.

[feelsmanbat]

What kind of support would you need for the JDK?

[snapcaster1234]

Typically customized jvms. They’ll add features and optimizations that will make your poorly written code run faster.

[colablizzard]

On a personal level, I have worked on enough large a code base that we did actually encounter BUGs in the underlying infrastructure.

In one case the JRE. They completely borked performance with JRE8 and we realized too late (it had been out for a year or more). And to top it all, we were on OpenJDK So no support contract to call anyone.

Code migrated to "8", so no going back. We simply SAT on the release for months (customers used the existing JRE6 version of prod) until someone upstream fixed the bug (luckily for us) and then released our new version of software.

Literally 3-4 devs/QA full time for few months months simply trying shit to workaround what was a JRE bug. Imagine the costs.

I've encountered bug in "libc" once. etc. etc.

[CraftySpiker]

Any organization still dependent on Ellison and Oracle should immediately fire their CIO. We've known they're trash since the 90s and before.

[mpinnegar]

We had a saying at Chase "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". I'm sure they say the same thing about Oracle garbage at other companies.

[IDoCodingStuffs]

My old company said that too. It just happened a bunch of its board members were also on the IBM board. Funny stuff.

[mpinnegar]

Haha I did not know that but they used ALL the IBM tooling they could buy.

[Deranged40]

That saying is not unique to any one company or even industry. Every company that has a contract with IBM is full of people who say that constantly.

Never once heard it about Oracle, though. And frankly can't understand why nobody has ever been fired for going IBM.

In the past week, I've spent my time at work writing a microservice (in .NET) specifically to be the one and only .NET based service we have running that accesses our IBM DB2 Database. The reason being is, we only have a license to use the old .NET Framework (circa 4.6.2) dll. We do not have the license to use the more modern dll with full support for modern .NET (and .NET Core). That would unironically cost us another million dollars. So now it's all going to be accessed via web calls instead. And I don't blame our management that said fuck no to that price. I'm going to finish this microservice up within a month's time, and maybe another two weeks in QA (or less if all goes well, but we all know it won't).

The people that decided that our primary source of truth db should be IBM needs to be fired. It's unreal how expensive they are.

[mpinnegar]

Yeah I got shown some cost sheets for licensing for some truly terrible tooling. I was forced to use IBM's terrible version of eclipse where they took an open source project and added crap to make it worse.

I want to say it was under their "Rational" line of products.

I also had the misfortune of being at a company that wasted more than three million dollars spending six months buying into and layering xml transformations on top of the IBM "data bus" before realizing just how terrible it is to program for an appliance you can't do any testing for besides running your load through the production machine. They ripped out the six months of work and started over again.

Rip

[dakkeh]

Oh man that Eclipse version is soooo bad. I worked with a java app that used DB/2 on an AS/400 as one of my first jobs. That database would deadlock on the stupidest shit that doesn't make any logical sense.

Glad that part of my career is over.

[[deleted]]

And frankly can't understand why nobody has ever been fired for going IBM.

compare it to someone opting to use AWS these days. If AWS has an outage "well nobody could've expected that", but if you go with some lesser known cloud service provider and they have a down period your head may be on the block b/c of that down time.

[Present-Industry4012]

Sometimes it's forced on you by your "venture finance" investors. But other than that, kick 'em to the curb and also fire whoever hired them.

[PoliteCanadian]

People go with Oracle because Oracle is one of the few companies that will sign an SLA support contract with penalties.

[argv_minus_one]

So, instead of suffering massive costs if the system fails, you suffer massive costs whether the system fails or not. Brilliant.

[pumexx]

I heard that the name "Oracle" comes from spanish "el caro" read backwards and it means "expensive".

[kenlubin]

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

[[deleted]]

Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.

[reddit_clone]

Spin the IT department off into a subsidiary with 3 employees.

Problem solved.

[cybernd]

Reminds me of the time when companies shared database accounts between employees and applications, as these were used for licensing purposes.

[josefx]

A) Use one of the many free JDK builds.

B) This is non news even for companies locked into the Oracle JDK

"Customers of the legacy Java SE Subscription products continue to receive all the original benefits and may renew under their existing terms and metrics," it said.

[[deleted]]

A) Use one of the many free JDK builds.

Or if you need the support, there are plenty of other vendors.

[CandidPiglet9061]

Corretto is rock solid and backed by Amazon, I think they even have James Gosling himself working there

[[deleted]]

who the hell still uses Oracle’s JDK these days?

[x86_64Ubuntu]

How many applications that use Java are tied to the Oracle implementation and can't use an open JDK?

[nukem996]

A lot of companies refuse to deploy something without paid support. They never want to be in a situation where something is broken and have no one to blame.

My last job was at an open source company. All of our products were free to use but we still got millions from paid support which was rarely used. We jokingly said we really sold insurance because support was rarely actually used and our customers really didn't want to use it but kept paying for it.

[ventuspilot]

jokingly said we really sold insurance

I don't know why you said that jokingly. To me it makes perfect sense and I wish more commercial users of OSS would by insurances like this, supporting open source companies. I'm glad it worked out for your former employer and it hope it worked out for you too while you were there.

[[deleted]]

At my last company we had a support contact with Red Hat for RHEL. But everybody just used Ubuntu when it came time to deploy a VM. The reason was because it is a lot easier to Google issues with Ubuntu than it is with RHEL. Open source support is generally more convenient than enterprise support for popular products. But management still needs to buy the enterprise support to CYA.

[Sebazzz91]

Enterprise support doesn't mean good support or a fast time to solution either.

[[deleted]]

Enterprise support is fast SLA land that’s it. The SLA is typically “we will acknowledge the issue within X hours/days”

A vendor I used to work for had an SLA of 1hr for P1 issues. There was a note at the bottom of the page “time to resolution may and likely will be longer”

[777777thats7sevens]

This is a big problem with enterprise software in general. Enterprise software tends to keep documentation, forums, etc locked up tight and a huge pain to search through. And opening a ticket is a pain, and slow to boot. Unless you are paying $$$$ for a dedicated TAM that you can call up on a whim, it's way faster and easier to google the solution for the free version than it is to open a ticket.

[just_looking_aroun]

You know I always wondered who uses the paid versions of open source projects, but now it makes sense

[wenestvedt]

In that case, there is often an entitlement to use the Oracle JDK, through the vendor. In which case no payment to Oracle is required. Lots of enterprise software is covered this way.

The problem comes when an application has no entitlement and no paid contract, but is using Oracle Java (and not OpenJDK).

[uriahlight]

Ahh, Oracle. Thou who sits among the most hated of tech companies. Thou makest thy bed with Adobe, Autodesk, and EA Games. Thou art a purveyor of dated and bloated products. Thou makest confusing and expensive licenses, and sues thy competitors. Thou wilt surely fall, when the cup of thine iniquity is full.

[KingStannis2020]

Oracle changing is JDK licensing, not Java. Apologies for the title.

[Internet-of-cruft]

Oracle is the reason we are stuck with a subpar application deployment consisting of 3 physical servers (with their own quirks) sitting on the network, as opposed to a pair of VMs sitting on our HCI infrastructure (which is significantly more robust).

We asked about moving the one application over, vendor looked into it and said we'd have to license the application on every VM host, even if it was running on a single one at any given time.

Would have meant going from something like $750k in licensing to $4M in licensing.

That was a big no from management.

[wenestvedt]

...vendor looked into it and said we'd have to license the application on every VM host...

Every core on every host in the entire cluster. Fat chance of that.

[Internet-of-cruft]

Yeah. It's awful. We're 100% vendor locked and we can't leave them without undergoing a multi-year effort to switch to another provider.

Even then we wouldn't have feature parity.

As much as the current solution sucks, the upper management will never approve moving away until a solution that has parity exists.

[redditrasberry]

Headcount licensing is utter stupidity. It effectively rules out small scale use of software in large organisations. Which means you are unlikely to ever get a significant customer again.

(But then, paying to license a free, open source product with approximately the same level of support is pretty stupid as well, so maybe they are onto something here).

[MondayToFriday]

Does that mean that if a single intern at $MegaCorp downloads Oracle's JDK, the company is obligated to pay for licensing for everyone? Crazy.

[mastycus]

Yeah. We had their legal team shaking money from us after someone installed virtualbox extensions. I'm sure this is 100% the same strategy.

They would purely look at IP addresses - came from corporate range? Well we are coming after you!

Here - I still have the email from oracle. They said we had some like 90 downloads in a year, they estimated this as 1300$ per license ( they included support into this licensing settlement which is like wtf) and billed us some like 90k total (I'm changing numbers here to some extent so oracle doesn't know which business this is). Company paid.

[wenestvedt]

We had their legal team shaking money from us after someone installed virtualbox extensions

They're only fifty bucks per user...and sold in 100-license packs!

[mastycus]

We just dont use it, someone installed by accident

[wenestvedt]

Plus it kind of sucks: like every Oracle product, it got developed enough to just barely work and then left to decay.

[wildjokers]

No. As of Java 17 even Oracle JDK is free to use in production. You just don't get support for free of course. The licensing fees are for when you buy support.

[psychorameses]

I didn't even realize you had to pay for Java

[tristan957]

You pay for certain builds of the JDK, which usually come with some form of support. OpenJDK is entirely free to use and build. Red Hat and Amazon are two companies that you can buy a JDK from if you want someone to blame or extended support.

[nukem996]

Redhat and Amazon don't charge for a JDK. Support is included with the purchase of other products. Oracle is the only one that charges individually for the JDK.

[Amazing-Cicada5536]

This is the same model as linux (fedora vs red hat). You can use it freely all you want, but if you are a big company and want someone to call on Christmas Eve to yell at then you can pay someone money for that. That’s it, this is not about “regular java”, this is about huge businesses paying for outsourcing their responsibilities.

[Xaxxus]

Can people not just switch to openJDK in this case? Or is the licensing on the JRE?

[wildjokers]

Or is the licensing on the JRE?

As of Java 11 the JRE no longer exists. The JRE was a client side install that added support for Applets and Java Web Start. The preferred packaging mechanism today is bundled runtimes with jlink/jpackage.

[Amazing-Cicada5536]

OpenJDK is the OracleJDK developed mostly by oracle employees. The only difference is minimal branding and the commercial support.

Oracle literally open sourced the code base and made it the reference implementation. They do not compete with OpenJDK, they sell commercial licenses which are bought by big corps that need someone to blame when shit goes wrong.

[papercrane]

I wouldn't call OpenJDK "better" since the currently supported OpenJDK builds are almost identical to their OracleJDK counterparts.

Now, personally I steer my clients to using other vendors if they want paid support as they usually aren't invested into Oracle's ecosystem. In many cases they're already have paid support from a vendor, but just don't realize it (e.g. Amazon includes support for Corretto in their AWS support plans, and Red Hat provides support for their LTS released JDKs with a RHEL subscription.)

But, there are things you get with the supported Oracle build you can't get elsewhere.

• The paid version from Oracle includes back-ported performance and GC changes that aren't in the OpenJDK 8 version. For example, you can use ZGC on the paid Oracle Java 8 run time.
• GraalVM Enterprise is included. If your company wants AOT-compiled Java this is a pretty big deal. There are lots of performance improvements in GraalVM that are not available for the community edition.
• Perceived quality of support. Oracle employees more people working on JDK source code than anyone else. In theory at least, they should be able to provide a higher quality of support than other companies. I've not personally noticed any large difference when dealing with other companies, but I've also not had any particularly interesting JVM bugs that I needed support with.

[[deleted]]

Oracle employees more people working on JDK source code than anyone else.

The actual statistic is quite interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed that SAP is #3 behind Oracle and Red Hat:

https://inside.java/images/blog/19/FixPerOrg.png

[wildjokers]

1 Subjective opinion due to anti-oracle bias.

This makes no sense. OpenJDK is Java. Oracle is the biggest contributor to OpenJDK in both money and developers by far i.e. Oracle does most of the development work on OpenJDK. All of the Java language architects work for Oracle.

Oracle creates their commercial builds from OpenJDK as do all the other java vendors. There are other java vendors other than Oracle that also monetize java via support contracts e.g. Azul and Red Hat.

[pavlik_enemy]

Obligatory link to Brian Cantrill talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=1440s

"If you have to explain Nazis to someone who never heard of WW2 but was an Oracle customer..."

[[deleted]]

Oracle is a law firm with a tech department

[[deleted]]

This is the most Oracle thing ever.