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Oracle Begins Aggressively Pursuing Java Licensing Fees (theregister.co.uk)
Java SE is free, but Java SE Suite and various flavors of Java SE Advanced are not, and now Oracle "is massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licenses," reports the Register.
Oracle bought Java with Sun Microsystems in 2010 but only now is its License Management Services division chasing down people for payment, we are told by people familiar with the matter. The database giant is understood to have hired 20 individuals globally this year, whose sole job is the pursuit of businesses in breach of their Java licenses... Huge sums of money are at stake, with customers on the hook for multiple tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Slashdot reader rsilvergun writes, "Oracle had previously sued Google for the use of Java in Android but had lost that case. While that case is being appealed, it remains to be seen if the latest push to monetize Java is a response to that loss or part of a broader strategy on Oracle's part." The Register interviewed the head of an independent license management service who says Oracle's even targeting its own partners now.
But after acquiring Sun in 2010, why did Oracle's License Management Services wait a full six years? "It is believed to have taken that long for LMS to devise audit methodologies and to build a detailed knowledge of customers' Java estates on which to proceed."
Slashdot reader rsilvergun writes, "Oracle had previously sued Google for the use of Java in Android but had lost that case. While that case is being appealed, it remains to be seen if the latest push to monetize Java is a response to that loss or part of a broader strategy on Oracle's part." The Register interviewed the head of an independent license management service who says Oracle's even targeting its own partners now.
But after acquiring Sun in 2010, why did Oracle's License Management Services wait a full six years? "It is believed to have taken that long for LMS to devise audit methodologies and to build a detailed knowledge of customers' Java estates on which to proceed."
Larry Ellison is the greediest man on earth and Oracle is his prophet.
I never thought I would be on the same side as them.
Why is Snark Required?
The industry prefers a strongly typed language for certain mission-critical applications, but the choices are dwindling there. Dynamic languages are just a poor fit for certain applications.
JavaScript is not a viable alternative also because it has an awkward OOP model and/or syntax that forces one to over-use anonymous functions or lamdbas.
Table-ized A.I.
The overall story: Java is dead.
Java will die at a speed limited the by ability of large corporations to move away from using it.
A former client actually had this policy specifically related to Oracle products. No stuff allowed that doesn't run on the free JRE, and no Oracle database products at all, unless it applied to a mission critical piece of software for which there was no viable alternative. The reason: Oracle was too expensive, and they were tired of the audits and the constant nickel & diming. And this was a Fortune 500 company with deep pockets and no fear of (over)spending.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I have seen them try to claim license fees for trivial things within my own company. It cost them in the long run, since IT abandoned their software in short order, due to this vindictive approach.
The crazy API copyright case made Java a non-starter for any new projects, since they effectively want to contaminate third party code bases with their copyright, if you use any Oracle APIs, making it impossible to port/wrap Oracle designed interfaces. It was something our legal people couldn't countenance, resulting in a Java ban. Not a good way to run your business.
I don't see Oracle having any long term future. Nobody would make a new deployment of any of their products. The Oracle database is still a good product, but for most workloads, open source or commercial alternatives are cheaper/faster. In my opinion Oracle is still a better all round product than nearly all the alternatives. That's not enough any more though. The prohibitive costs, poor support, threats, and contempt for customers are insurmountable barriers. Like Sun, I think Oracle will vanish in the long run.
JEE is not proprietary. JEE is a (dead-end) standard for which multiple open source and proprietary implementations exists, both free to use (with paid commercial support) and fully paid.
What the article is about is about Java SE (Standard Edition) Suite and Advanced. This is apparently just Java SE with some additional (non-gratis) tools.
Long-time java developer here. I had to search myself as TFA is incredibly vague and the focus seems to be more on generating some sensationalist FUD.
To me it seems you're in the clear if you use the "standard" java stack for reading/running software such as jre, jdk, java ee,....
I think Oracle is only ramping up license inspection for clearly marked pay-for products such as http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaseproducts/overview/java-advanced-getstarted-2249239.html (java desktop, never heard of it), seems to contain the jrockit vm, monitoring tools, enterprise grade installer,....
I'm no Oracle fanboy (at all), but this seems no different from open source companies providing commercial enterprise-grade tooling on top of their base product.
Anyway, I could be wrong. But realistically speaking if Oracle really touches on the free character of java they will lose their developer community overnight.
Microsoft has released a CLR implementation under an MIT license, has put everything required to implement the CLR into an ECMA standard, and has released a public promise not to sue for any patents involved in the implementation of a CLR. Some of the APIs are exempt, but these are largely the Windows-specific ones. If you write portable C# code, then it's basically impossible for Microsoft to sue anyone that provides you with a platform on which to run it. Oracle has shown that this is not true for Java.
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I agree with you! However, C/C++ isn't 'sexy' and isn't a buzzword thrown around to attract more students. Learning C/C++ is hard as a first language, though it makes for better programmers. Java looks easy but encourages bad design principals. I wish more CS schools would teach first principals like used to be taught 20-30 years ago.
I know everyone loves to hate on Java and Oracle, but my understanding is that in order to access the licensed features, you have to deliberately add the command line arg "-XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures". It doesn't seem like rocket science what this might mean...