Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Discontinues Free Java Time Zone Updates
New submitter Noel Trout writes "For a long time in the Java world, there has been a free tool called the 'tzupdater' or Time Zone Updater released as a free download first by Sun and then Oracle. This tool can be used to apply a patch to the Java runtime so that time zone information is correct. This is necessary since some time zones in the world are not static and change more frequently than one might think; in general time zone updates can be released maybe 4-6 times a year. The source information backing the Java timezone API comes from the open source Olson timezone database that is also used by many operating systems. For certain types of applications, you can understand that these updates are mission critical. For example, my company operates in the private aviation sector so we need to be able to display the correct local time at airports around the world. So, the interesting part is that Oracle has now decided to only release these updates if you have a Java SE support contract. Being Oracle, such licenses are far from cheap. In my opinion, this is a pretty serious change in stance for Oracle and amounts to killing free Java for certain types of applications, at least if you care about accuracy. We are talking about the core API class java.util.TimeZone. This begs the question, can you call an API free if you have to pay for it to return accurate information? What is the point of such an API? Should the community not expect that core Java classes are fully functional and accurate? I believe it is also a pretty bad move for Java adoption for these types of applications. If my company as a startup 10 years ago would have been presented with such a license fee, we almost certainly could not have chosen Java as our platform as we could not afford it."
Why doesn't java use the operating system to provide that information in the first place? At least on operating systems that provide that sort of information, which isn't just "linux" but pretty much all unices.
Also, ISTR the source updates maybe twice a year, and is free, so I don't see why java has to be so special. Then again, oracle is a very special company in that regard. Everybody needs this, and in fact needs everybody else to have it too, so it's stupid penny pinching that's going on here.
And it is very stupid, just like their handling of patches for critical holes turned out to be criminally stupid. It's not like their head honcho needs the money, seeing how he squanders it on airport fines and the like.
Yes, but Python's bytecode is much higher-level than the bytecode used by the other three, because it doesn't have explicit typing of variables or direct integer manipulation. The performance implications are substantial if you're performing any non-trivial calculations. (Of course, if your process is I/O bound, this is largely irrelevant...)
Python also cannot be efficiently multithreaded, which is a killer for many high-performance applications.
"Develop software - production software - in an interpreted language?"
What the hell do you think Java and C# are? Compared to C and C++ they are interpreted languages.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes. We switched 6 years ago and never looked back. The java.util.Calendar classes in Java are pretty horribly broken--usability aside, they get some key calculations wrong, like ISO week of year.
The best part is that Joda doesn't need or use the time zone database bundled into Java SE, so they aren't affected at all by Oracle's support policies.
Go has the same problem that Ruby has: too many damn weenies in the community.
I don't mean an overabundance of men and penises, which is indeed a problem for both, but the smugness and the attitude one must endure when dealing with them.
I try to stay current with the technologies that others are using, so I've worked on some small personal projects in Ruby, Go and Python. I usually ask questions in IRC when I happen to get stuck.
When I was asking questions about Ruby and Go, the people there would constantly tell me that what I was doing, or even just aiming to do, was "wrong". So, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. Hey, maybe I am wrong, and maybe they do have a better way. Yet every single time their suggestions would not help me attain what I wanted, would obviously not work, or were even outright harmful in some cases.
I never got this in the Python IRC channels. When I asked a question, they'd give me helpful answers, or at least help orient me in the right direction. They wouldn't take a holier-than-thou attitude with me. They wouldn't flat out tell me what I wanted to do was "wrong". They wouldn't give me suggestions rife with obvious security holes or other bugs.
The Python community helped me with my problems, and made me more efficient. The Go and Ruby communities just made me feel annoyed, like I was dealing with a bunch of know-it-all teenagers. Then again, maybe that is exactly what was happening. I was dealing with adult men and women when using Python, but I was dealing with passively-rebellious youth when seeking help with Go and Ruby.
If you were worried about problems that might happen when different people owned Java, then you should have listened to Richard Stallman and never started using it in the first place.
As it is, thanks to Stallman and others, there are now open alternatives.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."