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Oracle To Monetize Java VM

Posted by Soulskill on from the who-runs-your-pr-team-anyway dept.

jtotheh writes "According to the Register, Oracle is going to make two tiers of Java Virtual Machine — a free one and a premium paid one. 'Adam Messinger, Oracle vice president of development, told QCon that Oracle plans to offer a "premium" edition of the JDK in addition to the open-source JDK. Both, it seems, will be based on a converged JRockit VM and the Hotspot JVM from Sun Microsystems. The converged JVM will be released under the OpenJDK project. ... Messinger didn't explain how the premium JVM would differ [from] the free version, but the premium edition will likely see performance tuning and tie-ins to Oracle's middleware.'"

4 of 641 comments (clear)

  1. Oracle is doing everything they can to fuck up by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm going to laugh as their Sun acquisition goes down in flames and they end up losing money on the whole deal. They seem to be working to identify any market they can that things are working in and eliminating it. They've done a great job at getting us to work at getting rid of all our Solaris systems as fast as we can.

    While in theory this could be fine for Java, I can't imagine it will be being how poorly Oracle has handled things so far. Most likely it'll be a case where the free JVM will be a piece of crap on purpose, and the pay for JVM will be required for anything to work well. Ya, well, that'll fly like not at all. People are not going to go and buy something to make Java apps work better. Perhaps companies who rely heavily on Java on the back end will, but more likely they'll just stop upgrading and switch to something else.

    I guess we'll see, maybe I'm wrong and the premium version of the JVM really will provide worthwhile premium features that high end users want, while the normal JVM remains for normal people. However I doubt it. I think they'll try and charge every person for the JVM on their computer, which just won't fly.

    1. Re:Oracle is doing everything they can to fuck up by shristov · · Score: 5, Interesting

      According to Oracle (TFA), "There will always be a high-performance gratis JVM." Well, perhaps Oracle are just going to add enterprise-class features to Java - for example, the JRockit hot swapability mentioned in the article. Once you need such features, chances are you are able and willing to pay for these. The rest of the community could continue using Java for non-mission critical purposes. In time we'll see if this strategy is successful, or not. If demand for features like the ones Oracle is planning to develop is great enough surely open alternatives for some of these will pop up in foreseeable future. When/if this happens we'll hit the major issue worth discussing: how the Oracle-led and OpenJDK evolution paths will stay at least close to each other. If they diverge substantially, at least one would be doomed... if not both.

  2. Some insight from one of the bigger customers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Working in a senior role within a global investment bank, we buy a lot of vendor product, especially from what is now Oracle (Oracle Databases products, Weblogic products, etc.) - and if they want to charge us for the 'better' JVM going forward, no doubt we will pay for it. As will the other banks.

    And Oracle knows this. It does not give a shit about small-scale Java customers, but the big corporates, like us, well, they know that even if we decided tomorrow that all new projects were to move to C#, or C++, or Objective-C, or whatever, that it would take a long time to change course, and Oracle can still bill for a long time.

    One thing to remember - our bank gets and stays profitable because it pushes a lot of IT outside to third-parties (offshore developers are *much* cheaper than in London and NewYork), and they do not see any problems with getting a global price agreement with companies like Oracle and Microsoft.

    Personally, I am brushing up my C++, learning Objective-C and C#, as I think the medium and smaller companies in the market will start to migrate away from Java, as the cost savings of cheaper Java developers is lost once you have pay large amounts for the Java install and licensing.

    Stallman wrote the Java trap, and we all laughed. Sun is nice we thought, it'll be ok. We were all wrong. Stallman saw further, he saw that even if Sun was ok, if someone bought Sun, then things could get messy. Welcome to messy.

  3. Re:Scala, Groovy, Ada. by Haeleth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You are confusing the theoretical cost of ideal garbage collection with the actual cost in a particular implementation.

    I have worked on optimizing real-world Java applications that really were running too slowly. The problem really was that they were allocating too many short-lived objects in a modern JVM, and reducing the number of allocations really did improve performance significantly. Sorry if reality doesn't match your fashionable assumptions, but that's just the way it is.

    Just look at some benchmarks some time. Scala performance is closer to Python than Java. Yes, often that's fast enough. No, it is not always possible to throw hardware at the problem when it isn't.