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."

Comments

Re: Python

[ph1ll]

I believe Oracle does this with every JDK as they approach End of Life. ("Want us to continue patching JDK 8 rather than you upgrading to JDK 9? Fine, then pay us"). The story here is just the pricing model has changed AFAIK.

Zulu

[allquixotic]

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.

Re:Python

[angel'o'sphere]

Static typing, Generics, run time/load time byte code instrumentation, jit compilation, picking from a handful (or with 3rd party VMs more) garbage collecting algorithms, Annotations I guess there are plenty more, but I'm not a Python expert.

Re:Python

[Jane Q. Public]

Nimrod was a legendary great hunter.

Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd that with tremendous sarcasm.

It's not an insult.

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if anyone wonders why people use Python instead of Java, here is a pretty damn big reason.

Some people think cucumbers taste better than pickles. Python v Java is a decision only hobby programmers make. For any project even remotely big enough to consider paid support for their development/runtime environment, the answer would be use both and whatever else you need.

Re:Python

[MtHuurne]

Generics exist because of static typing; there is no need for them as a language feature when you have dynamic typing.

Python has decorators which can do more or less the same things that annotations can.

Static typing and execution speed are the main differences that matter, in my opinion. Static typing can be an advantage or disadvantage, depending on what you're building. Recent versions of Python have optional type declarations that can be used for static code checking, but I haven't yet tried those in practice, so I don't know how useful they are in bridging the gap between static and dynamic typing.

Execution speed is usually much better (like a factor 4 to 10) in Java, although if you use a lot of library calls or I/O, the interpreter is not the deciding factor in the speed of a Python program and then it can run just as fast as Java.