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Oracle Plans To Switch Businesses to Subscriptions for Java SE (infoworld.com)
A reminder for commenters: non-commercial use of Java remains free. An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:
Oracle has revamped its commercial support program for Java SE (Standard Edition), opting for a subscription model instead of one that has had businesses paying for a one-time perpetual license plus an annual support fee... It is required for Java SE 8, and includes support for Java SE 7. (As of January 2019, Oracle will require a subscription for businesses to continue getting updates to Java SE 8.)
The price is $25 per month per processor for servers and cloud instances, with volume discounts available. For PCs, the price starts at $2.50 per month per user, again with volume discounts. One-, two-, and three-year subscriptions are available... The previous pricing for the Java SE Advanced program cost $5,000 for a license for each server processor plus a $1,100 annual support fee per server processor, as well as $110 one-time license fee per named user and a $22 annual support fee per named user (each processor has a ten-user minimum)...
If users do not renew a subscription, they lose rights to any commercial software downloaded during the subscription. Access to Oracle Premier Support also ends. Oracle recommends that those choosing not to renew transition to OpenJDK binaries from the company, offered under the GPL, before their subscription ends. Doing so will let users keep running applications uninterrupted.
Oracle's senior director of product management stresses that the company is "working to make the Oracle JDK and OpenJDK builds from Oracle interchangeable -- targeting developers and organisations that do not want commercial support or enterprise management tools."
The price is $25 per month per processor for servers and cloud instances, with volume discounts available. For PCs, the price starts at $2.50 per month per user, again with volume discounts. One-, two-, and three-year subscriptions are available... The previous pricing for the Java SE Advanced program cost $5,000 for a license for each server processor plus a $1,100 annual support fee per server processor, as well as $110 one-time license fee per named user and a $22 annual support fee per named user (each processor has a ten-user minimum)...
If users do not renew a subscription, they lose rights to any commercial software downloaded during the subscription. Access to Oracle Premier Support also ends. Oracle recommends that those choosing not to renew transition to OpenJDK binaries from the company, offered under the GPL, before their subscription ends. Doing so will let users keep running applications uninterrupted.
Oracle's senior director of product management stresses that the company is "working to make the Oracle JDK and OpenJDK builds from Oracle interchangeable -- targeting developers and organisations that do not want commercial support or enterprise management tools."
Oracle is dying
Well, if anyone wonders why people use Python instead of Java, here is a pretty damn big reason.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Blood!
So, you can't download JavaSE for development if you're a business without paying a subscription fee OR you can't get special support and extra development applications without paying for the subscription fee?
If you're a business that just wants to develop vanilla Java SE applications (not run on a server or anything) does this affect that? The wording SOUNDS like it's for support and Premiere/Advanced downloads but it's not wholly clear...
-SaNo
Many applications require Java to run. I can't see my company paying $2M+ per year for Java to run those applications.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
IIRC JRE is only supported for a relativelly short period for free. With subscription, you get access to JRE updates for old versions, which can be valuable to some customers
Oracle is changing the licensing for paid features from an up-front plus annual fee to just an annual or monthly fee. Those features are mostly the JRockit JVM and the advanced management console, plus the premium support. You don't need this just to download and use the JDK.
to buy a new country. Islands are clearly not big enough for him.
Once Oracle finds out that your company is running Java SE they'll send in their 'goon squad' for an audit.
Then that unused printer that sits in the corner will be charged $25/month just because it could run Java.
Fail. Total and abject failure on Oracle's part. Another lesson in how to piss your customers off big time.
Posting Anon as I work for a company that will probably get hit big time by this and I don't want to make it easy for them to find us.
We've already decided that this is a step too far and will be working to remove any Oracle Java from our products.
DRM for Java ("subscription services") is clearly the future... for ORCL. This is the same ORCL who has lost so much touch with the industry [and lost steam for its Oracle Cloud mojo] that they STOPPED reporting the cloud growth with their investors because most customers are not buying into their cloud story. With this stick (unilateral move from perpetual to subscription licensing with eventual investor marketing push to say "oh so many customers have migrated to our amazing subscription services") they are essentially declaring war against their customers! Ugh.
The fact a tech website like this is full of users convinced that this means that commercial users of Java will now have to start paying is VERY bad news for Java. It re-enforces the feeling most people have that Oracle's takeover means Java is ceasing to be an open, free, technology, that was already a gut feeling most had when they started suing Google.
Despite being such a promising platform, between the poor and over ideological stewardship of James Gosling and his successors, and Oracle's malignant behavior over licensing, it's a system fewer and fewer people will want anything to do with.
People may be "wrong" about what this announcement means, but it doesn't matter: Their misunderstandings re-enforce a negative narrative about the platform, and we're seeing another nail in its coffin.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Azul offers OpenJDK builds for a lot of platforms using a product called Zulu, which is free of charge if you don't want any support. IMO they're better than Oracle's OpenJDK builds because you get more platforms. I think Zulu's might also continue to get security updates for longer than Oracle is willing to provide them for old versions of Java, so if you're stuck on Java 7 or 8, this is a great alternative. Of course, updating your code so you can jump to OpenJDK 10 is better, but sometimes that can take a long time for projects hitting worst-case issues with backwards compat.
Looking at their site, they seem to offer another product that claims better latency consistency, called Zing, that is non-free. So that tells me that Zulu is mostly unmodified OpenJDK builds (although they could be marginally faster if they are compiled with different option flags or a better compiler than Oracle uses). Zing is something else entirely.
P.S. - I am not a shill for Azul. I've never done business with them, worked for them, or bought their products. But I have downloaded their free OpenJDK builds and find them much more convenient to download (with fewer nags) than Oracle Java or Oracle OpenJDK.
Then you deserve this. Java should've died YEARS ago yet it still somehow have people developing for it.
It's not commercial users of Java. It's commercial support of java. You're free to keep using OpenJDK. If you want long term patches instead of upgrading to the latest OpenJDK, or commercial support... welp, someone has to pay for those things.
How to kill one of the most popular programming languages in one easy step.
The Pajeet Cancer strikes again.
Java has been a "legacy language" for over 10 yrs.
Whenever Oracle gets involved, they kill lit off due to their corporate goals which are the opposite of what every client wants.
Just look at all the projects which have forked or been killed since Oracle acquired SunMicro.
I feel bad for the companies who haven't learned the following:
* Never give Oracle money for anything other than a DBMS.
* 95% of your enterprise DBMS don't need Oracle DBMS.
commercial support == subscription. if you do not need support you do not have to pay!
... of PLs 'up there' in terms of future-safety.
I can't shake the notion that Oracle is doing a long and slow succession of minor Java screwups that are slowly adding up. The massive hype and influx of VM languages has been over for a few years now (a phase JS is just about over with now too), Scala and now Kotlin seem very well positioned to take over the JavaVM space (I've had experts recommend to me that I skip Java alltogether and go straight to Kotlin) and, as far as I can tell, if Google and Jetbrains play their cards right, Kotlin will be the successor, WASM transpilers and V8 runtimes will come and then Oracle will be shown a big finger for their perpetual Java lock-in attempts.
I'm learning Java right now because it's the go-to PL at my college where I'm doing my BsC in Media CompSci (Media and Java? ... Yeah, I don't quite get it either ...), but it has by now lost all it's sexyness with me. That was different 20 years ago but that was also a time when people would call be crazy for recommending to learn JavaScript and if you told people that they would be buliding entire stacks and pipelines with it they would've called you crazy. Despite entier GUI apps already built with it. (Did you know the Photoshop is built with JS?).
Botton line: Stear clear of proprietary technology is my motto evers since Adobe f*cked up Flash/ActionScript big time. Oracle seems hell bent on rolling back the FOSSing of Java and they might even succeed. But not with me.
My 2 Eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It was the gut feeling I had as soon as I had heard that they bought Sun instead of IBM.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm not aware of any JVM security holes. There was some old code from 20 years ago (called an Applet) that allowed Java code to be downloaded into a browser and executed, and that code (long since deprecated, unsupported, and removed) had lots of security holes.
In other recent news, Fred Brooks from IBM just announced that System/360 is GA!
They are killing It jobs by increasing costs. Businesses will respond by outsourcing to India their infrastructure to pay Oracle more money
They now only rent Oracle cloud, they refuse VMware motioning for PeopleSoft unless we pay 400% more plus additional core licensing.
When will this madness end? We need a erp competitor BAD
http://saveie6.com/
It's not control freakery. It's just preemptive bug reduction. Whole classes of bugs are removed if you use static types properly.
The thing you might consider "control freak"-like is a desire to NOT have things switched out from under you. That's related to static types, but not exclusive to them.
Java has a huge number of serious advantages over other platforms which is why it is the foundation of high performance, high reliability internet services to this day.
It is a MATURE language (although with periodic enhancements), not an up and comer that will either a) fail or b) succeed and gain a lot of the same complexity of the Java ecosystem in order to address the same types of requirements as people come to rely on it. New languages always start out cute and little...
Did you hit the reply to the wrong post, or are you just in the habit of pointing out things that are actually known to the person you're telling, and central to the point they're making?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You must first invent the Universe.
Is there anything to stop Oracle doing this to MySQL customers? Read the fine print.
I really fucking hate Oracle. A company of cunts.
OpenJDK is free under the GPL.
Oracle is charging for commercial support for their binary builds only.
You have ALWAYS been able to pay for Java commercial support.
Oracle JavaSE is built from OpenJDK.
This announcement has NO EFFECT on the vast majority of Java users or developers.
I switched away from Java to C# about 10 years ago and haven't seen a single reason since why I would ever want to go back. There have been no cons as far as the switch.
Can't all the Java developers create a HUGE AS FUCK class action lawsuit against Oracle if this move ends up rendering them unemployable? Imagine 20 years of Java experience begin wiped out as means of bring home the bacon. I think some lawyers would eat Oracle alive with this one.
No, I didn't. I've read it three times now, nowhere does I say that. For fucks sake, the word "commercial" appears only once, in a sentence that only an idiot would claim means I'm saying commercial users will pay.
No, it was just blatantly obvious from the fact I said that so many are "convinced that this means that commercial users of Java will now have to start paying". Given there was no other cases where I was describing a belief, there was no chance of it being misunderstood.
Next time read what you're replying to. And for fuck sake, doubling down and pretending it said what you pretended it said, to the point of making an easily verifiably false claim about the words I'd used, is really, really, dumb.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Probably not, no. And rightly not, if you're any good as a Java programmer there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to pick up other languages and platforms.
The market has spent 2018 sideways at worst, I think it's safe to say that the bears are coming. But that doesn't explain why your credit card debt still exists while you buy chunks of metal that have lost most of their value since 2012 and haven't even kept up with treasury bills in the short term. It also doesn't explain why you wasted one of the longest bull markets in history investing in silver? Or was your plan to invest in silver at it's peak and buy all the way down.... for later when silver has a massive spike in value like it did.... oh pretty much never except after the 2008 recession when fox was shilling precious metals to keep the price up so all the rich people who parked their cash there before the market crashed could sell at a good price.
The silver you bought in the early 2010s was all sold by rich people who used old idiots like you to manufacture demand for assets they all simultaneously no longer wanted now that the market was good.
Excellent work my friend.
I'll tell you what investment is going to pay off 17% a year no matter what the market is doing: Wanna hear this secret investment?
Paying off your credit cards right fucking now
As much shit as I have to take care of for them, they owe me. Applications with their own and vulnerable versions because their engineers can't write code that will survive a version change. This is really a PIA. From SAS to Netbackup to other things. All junk.
Maybe this will drive a stake through Java and kill it. Just as they've killed Solaris/SUN.
Same here, and one reason I ended up doing mostly C# rather than Java during the past decade or so.
Nonaggression works!