Gartner: Oracle probes orgs for Java compliance after new licensing terms Gartner is warning that Oracle "actively targets organizations" on Java compliance following the introduction of new contractual terms for the code. In a research paper, the global tech analyst said both existing Oracle customers and those with no Oracle products were being targeted by Big Red after the software and hardware …
This comes across as just more of Oracle's usual snakery* - customer compliance audits that invariably find in favour of Oracle.
The moral of this tale is to wean your company off any of Oracle's proprietary products at the earliest opportunity because one day they will come for you too.
*Definition:
The act of doing something shady. To be conniving, plotting, evil-doing. Trying to screw people. To act like a snake in the grass, e.g. Larry was up to his usual snakery.
Hmm.
I choose to run a few VMs in VirtualBox (strictly for personal use) on Linux for a couple of reasons.
1) It virtualises the guest machine's display and shows it in a host system's window.
2) It continues to work when you upgrade from one (free beer) version to another.
I dunno how things are now, but going back the free version of VMWare suddenly changed to rendering the guest display in a Java applet embedded in a web page, which was deeply unwelcome, and Hyper-V only gave you any kind of display via RDP.
Should the free version of VirtualBox suddenly cease to exist then I dare say that something like KVM will step in to the void.
-A.
>I choose to run a few VMs in VirtualBox (strictly for personal use)
The concern, that led to a lot of businesses banning it, is that a bunch of the plugins aren't free.
So a user somewhere in your organisation plugs in a USB device, clicks OK to some pop-up without reading the small print - and you trigger an Oracle audit.
I stopped using VirtualBox on Linux some years ago when it starting causing problems with dkms with nvidia drivers.
I have used virt-manager (RHEL7/CentOS7) to spin up the odd OS image (BSD, OpenIndiana etc) and mostly works fine.
Its just kvm + qemu afaik.
Anything to avoid oracle skulduggery.
Even when java was sun I avoided it like the plague - anything coded in it was always suspect and for sysadmin applications usually had to run as root.
Once oracle bought sun even more reason to avoid. More like ebola than plague :)
No need to avoid Java, it's actually pretty good and getting better. I code in quite a few languages, including supposedly more modern ones but I still like Java the best - it's got just enough boilerplate (and much less now than older versions) that you can tell what every part is doing. Groovy is the worst - there's no telling what's a method call or a reference to an object or a function in that.
Old, non-portable Java 8 code can stay on old, license-free Java versions.
New stuff under active development can be run on OpenJDK/Temurin or derivates.
What use cases of Java do really require considering this Oracle-extortion scheme?
...showed between 2x to 4x price increases...
That is what you will pay now and it excludes the exorbitant cost of lawyers when dealing with oracle.
Never deal with the devil. You will always burn in the process. Time to invest in porting to openjdk and friends, which will be massively cheaper than continuation with the devil.
I’ve spent the last few years working for a global organisation who have aggressively moved away from everything Oracle. No Oracle DB, no packaged Oracle DBs sitting underneath an application, complete rewrite of applications off the Java stack, no support for Java on their virtual desktop and Citrix environments, end-user device level software licensing running to ensure nothing has Oracle underneath the hood. It’s a strategic objective of the CIO and CTO functions.
JRE/JDK 8u102 stopped making the .oracle_jre_usage directory, if you use software which comes with an older version of Java then it will re-appear.
In any case you're safe with anything up to and including JRE/JDK 8u202. If you need anything anything higher there's e.g. Adoptium.
Use the OpenJDK or a supported dist like Coretto. No issues with licences to worry about and certainly better than giving money to Oracle for little or no benefit. It always surprises me that they have any customers at all given the cost & complexity of their products and onerous terms of using them.
I haven't been following it (because I had no need for the bits that still needed Java), but I recall from quite a few years back thatthere was a hard push in LibreOffice to lose its dependency on Java completely.
It appears that that work has as yet not yet been completed. These new Oracle shenanigans ought to provide a compelling argument to close this off, but I know refactoring legacy code is quite a swine to do.
Oracle's behaviour exemplifies ills created by misconceived introduction of legalised monopoly into commerce and manufacture. Although some believe otherwise, rentier economics is inimical to market-capitalism of the nature construed by Adam Smith.
Ill-effects arise from pricing being arbitrary. The underlying logic is price adjustment to maximise overall profit from those willing to pay. This replaces the 'price discovery' offered by competition in an open market.
Rentiers within the field of digitised (or digitisable) products are in extremely privileged position. They vend products which inherently lack scarcity because they have no physical substance other than that of any medium in which they might be embedded in any one instance. The most abstract example is an idea itself even should expression of that idea lead to a tangible physical artifice.
The monstrous monopoly pervades almost all aspects of culture ranging from recorded caterwauling of 'pop singers' to presentation of (occasionally) deep ideas in academic literature. The ersatz nature of monopoly 'competition' requires bolstering by an army of investigators and lawyers whose cost is factored into the prices of rentier goods.
Every citizen and aggregate body (e.g. government) feeds rentiers. Even when not buying an overtly rentier product, it is highly likely that somewhere in the cost of its making, payment has been handed to rentiers; for example, few businesses these days are not reliant upon proprietary computer software. Although it qualitatively is a different form of rentier economics, rental of office and retail premises is an identifiable component of price for many things; physical rental does broadly conform to supply/demand economics but contains huge distortions favourable to landlords.
Whereas markets determine price of many goods and services, there is no mechanism for external price restraint to be imposed upon vendors of digital goods which inhabit walled gardens,
I came here for the artwork of the skull in the coffee that accompanies this article. There's a song called "Sjeef by die koffie" (poison with the coffee) about Martti Ahtisaari claiming that the previous South African government tried to kill him by poisoning his morning coffee. Possibly the real reason he felt so sick was that he was observed drinking a great deal of produce from the Cape Winelands at a dinner the previous evening.
Anyway, Oracle is obviously poisoning your coffee with their Java offering – stay clear of the toxic waste. Capable programmers do not need anything that Java or .NET have to offer.
PS. If Twitter cost $44 beellion, and Java only fetched $7.4 beellion it should be indisputable what a worthless piece of hogwash Java really is.
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