back to article Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Only 14 percent of Oracle Java subscribers plan to stay on Big Red's runtime environment, according to a study following the introduction of an employee-based subscription model. At the same time, 36 percent of the 663 Java users questioned said they had already moved to the employee-based pricing model introduced in January …

  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Childcatcher

    Another footgun moment

    for Oracle.

    Larry got it wrong with this move. Since other Java implementations became available there was always an exit path for customers and they are voting with their feet.... big time.

    Oracle like a few other monster IT companies have lost the plot. Who in their right mind would recommend ORacle for anything these daya? Answer, only ORacle Consultants.

    1. Snake Silver badge

      Re: monster IT companies have lost the plot

      Many companies in today's late-capitalist world have "lost the plot". Everyone thinks they are irreplaceable and you, the customer, are completely expendable. Until you aren't and they're left holding their empty tithe baskets and wondering "Why??". Thanks to constant propaganda, companies have forgotten that those "stakeholders" to whom they owe a responsibility include the actual customers paying for their products.

      Somehow, customer interests have become so meaningless that the only thing that matters is Wall Street quarterly reports. From long lines and empty shelves at stores because they understaff the shop in order to maximize profits, to subscription models for heated seats in cars, they've forgotten...and we simply stay silent and let them get away with it. We've become the lemmings that get pushed over the edge and we've become used to the abuse, because "capitalism".

      1. fg_swe Silver badge

        Oh Yeah

        All these poor corporations such as Daimler, Shell, BP, Exxon, BASF, they have to give their last shirt to Oracle. NOT.

    2. fg_swe Silver badge

      FALSE

      SUN gave away Java, after having sunk serious money into its development. While sinking even more money into the continued maintenance and improvement of Java. They destroyed the Delphi business in that process, because many developers got accustomed to this socialist model of technology development.

      Then SUN had to be rescued from bankruptcy by Oracle.

      Oracle is a well-functioning business, which in turn provides 170 000 employees solid and well-paid jobs.

      You can argue all day about the specifics of payment for software products, but "totally free" is not an economic model, it is Marxist Stupor. See Cuba, Venezuela where they suffer hunger now.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "totally free"

        Sorry........nothing is "totally free".

        ....but customers can choose, say OpenJDK.....and take responsibility for support themselves. That's absolutely not "totally free"..............

        ....but it does put a distance between the customer and Larry Ellison!!!!

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Sure

          This only "works" because SUN has given away the source code for the Java systems for free. They played the Jesus of the software world and died for IT cheapskates.

          1. Snake Silver badge
            Pirate

            But you're forwarding the principle of capitalism

            Which means that "market forces" play a hand: in this case market force-logic should dictate that, if your competition is cheaper or even 'free', you don't go raising your prices arbitrarily and expect World+dog to be a path to your door.

            According to "capitalism", Sun therefore shouldn't have played with fire and raised their prices if one of their major competitors in the marketplace doesn't charge as much, or even anything, at all. The capitalist theory states that market pressures would lead to lower prices and increased efficiency...except, like here, when they don't.

            Somehow "capitalism" only works [one way] when Big Money wants it to; giving "capitalism" a lot of lip service except when it doesn't benefit them.

            1. fg_swe Silver badge

              Re: But you're forwarding the principle of capitalism

              Sun prolly spend several billion dollars on Java over the years. What they got in "return" was much less than that. They got "goodwill", but their employees needed hard dollars to pay the rent, the health insurance, the food, the car, the family, the vacation.

              In the end it is a simple cashflow issue. If you have a massive staff of expensive engineers, you also need a source of revenue to pay for your staff.

              1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

                Re: But you're forwarding the principle of capitalism

                If Sun had not made Java available for free, it would never have gone anywhere and this allowed companies like IBM to develop things like JIT compilers. It's no coincidence that since Oracle bought Sun, interest in Java has declined.

                All Oracle seems to be interested in is milking an increasingly elderly cash cow.

                1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

                  Re: But you're forwarding the principle of capitalism

                  Yeh interest in java has declined, thats why basically ALL the worlds main services are all java... amazon, google, ebay, android, nobody at all is using java

              2. katrinab Silver badge

                Re: But you're forwarding the principle of capitalism

                The market does care about whether you “need” the money. You can’t do monopoly pricing when you don’t have a monopoly.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Sure

            Cheapskates? I choose open source alternatives for clients firstly based on their needs, secondly based on their budget and finally because I want the project out of the way and done, I don't want to fuck around waiting for quotes, negotiating discounts picking this tier over that one etc etc...also for most clients expertise is more valuable than software licenses, so they'd rather pay for an expert to be available when they need them than spunk their entire budget up the wall on licenses.

            It's not about being cheap, it's about allocating the money where you think it's most important. If you spend the biggest chunk of your budget on licensing, you end up with not a lot left to keep the experts around to maintain, operate and develop on your kit. The same money is being spent, just less of it is allocated to licenses. If you decide to ditch MSSQL for Postgres for example, you could be saving enough money for an extra engineer or two.

            In days of yore there used to be incentives for people to sling licenses from the likes of Oracle, Microsoft et al...you'd get a commission out of the sale to make up for the lower rates you had to charge to accommodate licenses in a given budget...that all disappeared a long time ago and left a black hole for people in terms of income...so rates went up...and to accommodate for that, the boots on the ground started peeling off the layers of licensed software to make up for it. Do we really need that MSSQL license? Can we find the same features and performance or better elsewhere? Do we really need a third domain controller with all the extra CALs? Do we need to use IIS with an "Internet Connector License"? Do we really need a bare metal Windows server to run that Windows specific software, or can we virtualise Windows 11 instead and use the rest of the resources for something else?

            In my earlier days, decades ago, I was predominantly a Microsoft guy (professionally anyway) and I used to get kickbacks from volume licensing (about 10-15%), a share of ongoing subscription licenses, and various perks for being qualified (which incentivised more training, and the pursuit of more certs) that enabled me to provide lower rates to clients, which gave them more budget for licenses...I started to see all this tapering off (and the savings found by Microsoft etc were not handed to the customer, they just pocketed it) and it became and tougher and tougher to operate in that world because Microsoft etc wanted a bigger slice of the cake and it came at my expense, the customer was still paying the same as far as they were concerned,but I was staring at the abyss considering dropping my rates...I saw the writing on the wall early and started to taper off my use of Microsoft products, so I never had to drop my rates, in fact I was able to increase them...where they were the default choice they no longer were...eventually it became more about time than money...I wanted to be able to visit a client on a Monday to build a spec, return on Tuesday to start deploying and be complete on Wednesday then paid the end of that month no problems...that's pretty difficult with commercial licensing involved because whilst I have to wait 30 days to be paid, licensing is always paid up front...so if the licensing is more expensive than expected, it's me that gets the kick in the balls...either less pay or I have to wait an additional 30 days while the customer sorts out their cashflow etc...commercial licensing can fuck you on more aspects than just cost...working with Oracle and Microsoft is like having a really shitty team member that doesn't give a fuck about you, your project or your customer.

            1. fg_swe Silver badge

              SUN

              They designed, developed and maintained an efficient and memory-safe language and never found a way to monetize it.

              They bought OpenOffice and gave it away for free, even for commercial use.

              They bough MySQL and also gave it away for free.

              Eventually they were a software company with a dying hardware business providing the declining revenue and soon negative profits.

              Lunacy.

              1. Dan 55 Silver badge

                Re: SUN

                Did Sun have a time machine to open source MySQL?

      2. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

        Re: FALSE

        It wasn't some weird Marxist eulogy, it was a business decision by Sun Microsystems. Open sourcing your code and selling support (and also, in Sun's case, hardware) is a business model that's worked very well for others such as Red Hat and Canonical. It wasn't necessarily a terrible idea in theory, they just failed to come up with a workable business model to sustain it.

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Re: FALSE

          Even RHAT/IBM now have to tighten the screws to make sufficient revenue on "support". They will supply patches only to paying, licensed customer

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: FALSE

            Do they have to? Other, that it is, to meet some arbitrary analyst expectations? The likely result is that they shed those customers who were running a mix of Centos in development and test and RHEL in production.

            1. Marcelo Rodrigues
              Boffin

              Re: FALSE

              "Do they have to? Other, that it is, to meet some arbitrary analyst expectations? The likely result is that they shed those customers who were running a mix of Centos in development and test and RHEL in production."

              Not to mention "mind share".

              If I run <something> at home, I'm more inclined to use <same something> at work, if it's possible.

              If I can spun several free VMs running "something", to validate my production environment, then I'm more inclined to use "the same something" elsewhere.

              It all adds up.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: FALSE

                This. If the only way for me to test and validate a product is to spend tens of thousands of pounds buying it, I'm very unlikely to recommend it to a customer.

                This is also why Microsoft has never really cared about piracy...as long as the average joe can't easily get a copy for free, they don't care.

          2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

            Re: FALSE

            you forgot to mention they only patch paid customers for legacy out of support versions of java. Very different from what you said. If you are using a current java, then you get all the patches.

          3. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: FALSE

            Yeah but support has a cost, because you need to hire people and the margins are thin there...they'd be more profitable if they dropped the prices and left support up to certified third party engineers.

      3. talk_is_cheap

        Re: FALSE

        Sun failed because its hardware business model failed.

        The cost of Java was a rounding error for a company that needed to sell very costly unix-based SPARC systems. What did not help was that SUN got into the X86-based server market so 'good enough' systems from Sun reduced the sales of their 'top end' systems.

        Just like all the other 'advanced' system providers of the 80's and 90's, the 2000 bubble burst and commodity servers did them in. When they did innovate with things like the cloud based utility offering it was easy for others to duplicate the offering once it was clear that there was a market using far cheaper X86/Linux solutions.

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Not Really

          Each and every investment of a company is intended to support her on the long run. It would have been only fair and square to demand a "reasonable" license fee for commercial Java use. Then SUN could have transformed herself from a hardware into a software company.

          You are saying the hardware business was no longer good enough to subsidize a complex software system. Subsidies are in the most cases a bad thing, which will distort markets and businesses.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Not Really

            "Each and every investment of a company is intended to support her on the long run."

            These days next quarter's results are the limit of vision. Long run is meaningless.

          2. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Not Really

            They had the choice to demand payment for commercial use. If they had done that, they would have gotten some short-term cash, but they might have lost users who didn't want to deal with annoying license audits so they used something else. That limits the ability of Sun to sell other services to those people. As with every other company that has ever existed, they have to decide between these alternatives.

            Since this seems to be a big issue in your comments, there's a word for this: capitalism. The company chooses its prices in order to compete with alternatives. Oracle is being no less capitalistic than Sun was. Sun made a decision to get lots of people using Java. Oracle's making a decision to get more money out of those people using Java, taking the risk that people will either use the free alternatives or a different language.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: FALSE

        “which in turn provides 170 000 employees solid and well-paid jobs”

        I haven’t tried to verify that number (or the claim that alljobs are well-paid), but I’ll assume it’s correct. I do wonder what percentage of those employees work for the legal and compliance auditing departments though.

      5. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: FALSE

        Java should have been regarded as a 'Loss Leader' inside Oracle. Customers with a good experience with Oracle around java could lead to other very lucrative business for LArry and co.

        But no... He wanted to grab everything including the kitchen sink and Java customers are bailing.

        We have one app that uses Java. It has been re-written to use an open source JVM. Because of that, I've coughed up the $50.0 for a Pro License. We won't now have the Oracle thought police calling on us demanding more money than we make in a year for their POS.

        Once upon a time I was in the Oracle camp, I was even a DBA in the 7.3.4 era of their database. Then they aligned themselves with the devil.

        I hope Larry's latest yacht sinks.

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Oh Man

          You can always quit Oracle and go to IBM and deal with their sharks. I predict it will not be cheaper or easier.

          Or go with Microsoft and discover their pecularities.

          If your application is not too big, use PostgreSQL.

          Nobody forces you into a relationship with Oracle, but many corporations have one, because they need a high performance database engine with commercial support.

          Be a real man and rewrite all Java apps in Rust. Don't complain when they do not have the same support quality.

          1. damiandixon

            Re: Oh Man

            Anything other than Java...

            Rust is not always the answer...

          2. Jagged

            Re: Oh Man

            We swapped everything over to OpenJDK ages ago. Nothing need to be rewritten.

            Also, when we swapped to OpenJDK we got a slight performance increase! Ha!

          3. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

            Re: Oh Man

            So you are going to work for years for nothing just to rewrite those apps ?

          4. Shalghar Bronze badge

            Re: Oh Man

            The Decision for any system neednt have anything to do with its real performance.

            One of the first questions (as a new trainee several decades ago) i learned to ask the customer was "Dürfen wir Qualität einbauen oder MUSS es Siemens sein ?" ( May we use quality items or do you insist on us using Siemens ?).

            Although this quesion was meant for machinery and PLC, i tend to believe that the "decision" made for $brandnamestuff is not based on the actual performance but on what $decisionguy has ever heard of or which vendor scammed/bribed/lied the best.

            If the less expensive solution works at least as well, theres no need for a ever mutating license disagreement and its unpredictable outcome. Well "unpredictable" is not quite correct when it comes to the probability of increasing costs.

            IF Lenze insists on hiding control options for their power inverters (8200 series) in another sub menu so you have to confirm the choices in the main menu with an undocumented (neither quickstart guide nor any other documentation gives any hint) additional option in submenu 7 or 8 THEN choose SEW or any other inverter thats not allen-bradley or GEC.

            IF Lenze insist on delivery schedules of several months and you get the very same inverters, albeit with a different sticker on the casing from Lovato in Italy for a better price, THEN buy from Lovato.

            IF ZAPI insist on having an "openCAN" bus with inconsistent bit lengths for both address and command packets THEN choose curtis or whatever.

            As long as there are alternatives, use the best for your usecase. If Oracle decides to make their java version an overpriced PITA, use something else that gets the job done. Simple as that.

        2. Avalanche

          Re: FALSE

          Why did it need to be "rewritten"? In my experience, unless you do very weird things, or relied on specific libraries included in their Java (which is generally just a matter of including that library yourself), an application running on Oracle Java will run just as well on Java from a different vendor.

          1. HMcG

            Re: FALSE

            > an application running on Oracle Java will run just as well on Java from a different vendor.

            Whilst that’s true, it would probably be better worded “just as poorly”. This is Java, after all.

            1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

              Re: FALSE

              Poorly as opposed what ?

        3. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

          Re: FALSE

          Rewritten to use an open source jvm ?

          All jvms use the same class libraries an the same binaries. There is no need to rewrite anything except changing the paths for the binary home dir.

        4. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: FALSE

          I think this is one last cash grab before Java is all but dead as a commercial offering...nobody wants to develop anything in Java. It's usually forced upon you by some wanker academic that skipped over being a developer and became a manager that has a very narrow view of the world.

          We live in a completely different world now to the one that existed when Java was born...Java, and the products built on it, these days are mostly anachronistic crap.

          Managing an environment that has one Java based product in it is a pain in the arse...having an environment with two products that rely on different versions of Java is the fucking pits.

          "This product was designed to work Java X, but you have Java Z installed"

          Ok fair enough, I'll just put the latest one on then.

          "This product will not work with versions new than Y"

          Fuck you!

          If someone comes to me asking me to deploy XYZ product that relies on Java, I will take the several days that it would take me to get the fucker working properly to find a better alternative that isn't Java based...roughly 10,000%+ of the time you can find something better, cheaper and easier to deploy than the initial suggested product.

          Most Java based products out there, at their core, were probably a shitty prototype written by a student for their coursework at Uni which somehow became a commercial product.

          I can count on roughly 8,000 hands the number of Java based products that exist that were developed by one person decades ago and are still maintained by the same person who has never worked on anything else...the older the product / developer is the shittier the product tends to be because 6 months was spent decades ago designing and building the product and 20 years has been spent trying to keep it working on newer versions of Java to the point where at least half the code is compatibility workarounds for the original code.

          It's just garbage.

          1. Jagged

            Re: FALSE

            Honestly a strange world you live in. Are you supporting some in-house developed stuff?

            I support tons of industry leading products, written in java. Different environments are really not a problem in this day and age. It should not need explaining.

            1. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: FALSE

              While I can't claim to have counts, I know several pieces of Java code that have been maintenance problems. I'm thinking of a set of three programs from the same source, written in Java without any other languages or dependencies, which ran on Windows, but not Mac OS or Linux. I can blame the developers for that oversight. What I find it harder to blame them for is that you still need Windows 7 or earlier to run them. For some reason, Windows 10 and 11 won't allow them to run. Newer JREs refuse to run them at all. JREs from the same era try to run them, but then crash without usable error messages. These aren't programs from 1998 that happen to still run under Windows 7. They were originally released in 2012 and had updates until 2017.

              I don't have the source for these, so patching them is not an option for me. The original authors might have the source and are still in business, but I've given up on them doing anything. Occasionally the idea has come along to reimplement them. If that idea is executed, Java isn't the tool that comes to mind for doing it. I don't think the language is entirely to blame for this course of events, but neither can I pretend that Java is great from a backwards-compatibility perspective.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: FALSE

                With a lot of these "won't run in versions newer than X" situations, it's not because the code isn't compatible, it's because the compiled apps were burned in with a fixed version range that the developers put there because that's what they tested on...I've had quite a lot of success working around this in the past by decompiling Java stuff and recompiling it with new JDKs...it's not easy though and results are not guaranteed...you also sometimes lose key functionality that the app relies on (usually licensing garbage that prevents the tool activating or something). Usually though Java devs tend to build things in a modular fashion and it's sometimes possible to rip out the functionality you need and build a new UI around it.

                I've got into hot water doing this a few times, typically though it ends with just loads of angry emails. I've never heard of anyone being sued for this.

                Weirdly, my skillset these days contains more experience reverse engineering Java stuff than actually building it from scratch...the irony with a lot of these products is that it's usually cheaper to hire someone to reverse engineer an existing product to get the features they need and build something else than it is to keep the license going...there are tons of Java based products out there that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year for a single user license...when you're in that kind of league for paying licenses, it becomes very tempting to just rip off the functionality and build an alternative in house...twenty to thirty grand on a hacker for a month to reverse something and build an equivalent for your devs to take on and polish is much cheaper in the long run than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a decade...or even just accepting whatever technical limitation it is you've hit and living with it.

                It's pretty much industry standard at this point, even Facebook has done it in the past. They hit some technical snags with PHP and instead of waiting for PHP to catch up, they created their own extended version of PHP (HACK) and their own interpreter (HHVM)...eventually most of that stuff was rolled back into PHP and they are essentially the same now...but still, they had to find a way at the time.

                I even switched a lot of production servers to HHVM at the time because even with just regular PHP code it was so much faster than the regular PHP interpreter...it saved bucked loads in hosting costs. I don't use it anymore because the difference between PHP and HHVM these days is barely worth it...if it even makes a difference at all.

                We've all been there with Java based stuff before...crappy UIs, slow performance...just naff in general and any of us, if we could find an alternative product that did the same thing that wasn't based on Java, would swap in a heartbeat.

                Thankfully, these days, I don't think there is anything that runs on Java that hasn't been replicated or done better elsewhere.

              2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

                Re: FALSE

                doublelayer: For some reason, Windows 10 and 11 won't allow them to run. Newer JREs refuse to run them at all. JREs from the same era try to run them, but then crash without usable error messages.

                cow: Im calling bullshit, java runs all windows. Java especially "server side" java uses very little from the O/S so its highly doubtful any windows change would break anything.

                1. doublelayer Silver badge

                  Re: FALSE

                  This is wonderful. We've finally found something you're not endlessly negative about.

                  I don't know what the authors of these tools managed to do to break it. I do know that their code is all JVM-based, because when it broke I disassembled it and identified that no native libraries other than the JRE were being used. What exactly they did inside that code I can't say. I probably wouldn't have decompiled it anyway, and the users decided not to have me either reimplement or continue to troubleshoot it. We tested it on a lot of Windows 10 machines, and it reliably failed the same way on every one of them. It doesn't mean it's Java's fault, as it easily could have been a dependency's fault, but if it was, the dependency concerned was running from the JRE and most likely written in Java.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: FALSE

              "Are you supporting some in-house developed stuff?"

              No. I generally help companies migrate their legacy stuff (usually written in Java, an ancient version of .NET or something) to something else. Usually they want to migrate because they have hit some sort of dead end...usually with hiring...but also technical dead ends...years of undocumented patches or just no documentation at all...various issues that need to be resolved.

              If you've done a lot of work with "industry leading" products, you'll know as well as I do that there's always a ton of shit under the bonnet that needs sorting out. The messiest area is things like BIOS firmware or device firmware. Go and analyse the latest Dell PowerEdge R230 BIOS update in binwalk and you'll see what I mean. There's code in that BIOS that existed long before the server did...large, "industry leading", behemoths usually have the worst software development practices.

              It's not difficult to hire Java devs, but it is very difficult to keep your product competitively priced if you do. The main reason a product is usually written in Java is not because Java was the optimal choice...it's because the original developer(s) knew Java the best.

              I'm kind of the "Littlest Hobo" of development. Every stop I make, I make a new friend, I fix their shit, migrate their code so they can dev again.

      6. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: FALSE...Sun was killed by the $10 stock barrier

        Sorry to break it to all you Sun Microsystems was killed by X, Y, Z people but Sun was killed, sorry aquired by Oracle, because during the Dot Com Bubble (when Sun made out like bandits) Sun did several stock spits too many. At least two or three.

        So when the Dot Com Crash happened starting late 2000 and Suns stock quickly decined Schwartz the CEO was totally out his depth. One of McNealys more boned headed decsions. So instead of doing a few reverse stock splits as people who knew what they were doing recomended. Because it would undermine analysits confidence in the company. Schwartz just did nothing as the stock price quickly decined to the $10 barrier. Once the stock went below the $10 barrier it was game over. Why $10? Because that was the limit price for stock held in volume by big instutional investors.

        So when Sun stock broke the $10 barrier the big instituational investors dumped the stock and in short order Oracle picked up Sun for a song. For a small fraction of its true value.

        Open sourcing the JDK / JRE made perfect business sense. And had Sun managed their stock splits more carefully on the way up 1995 to 2000 Sun would still be an indendent company today. Producing great techlogy and full of really great people. I was very impreseed by the people I met in Santa Clara back in the day. Reminded me very strongly of the people in Apple, in Cupertino , pre 1997. Especialy during Apples heyday in the 1980's.

        A sad loss. And easily avoided, Ultimately it was Scott McNealys fault. Once he made the Schwartz decsion it seemed like could never admit it was a huge mistake. Which is how it looked to most of us at the time. From the moment it was first annouced.

        RIP Sun. A once great company full of great people. Still missed.

        1. ecofeco Silver badge

          Re: FALSE...Sun was killed by the $10 stock barrier

          Reminds me of Compaq. Different events, same results.

          Compaq CFO initiates internal hostile takeover. Wins, and then drive the company into the ground, resulting in sale to HP. HP then proceeds to strip mine all assets and degrade quality and drives into the ground a second time. And then drives itself into the ground.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: FALSE...and Compaq killed DEC..by the bean counters

            Never a huge fan of Compaq since the early days. Never had the warm fuzzies about them. Their kit never seemed that impressive. But still better than Dell. But after they had destroyed DEC which was the crown jewels of not just Route 128 but of the whole US high tech industry of the time I was cheering on what HP did to Compaq. I know the C-Suite people responsible at Compaq walked off with their bulging bank accounts but I shed no tears when the HQ in Houston, TX was finally closed. They had destroyed so much real value in the tech business in such a short time. Given what had been achieved in the previous three decades who knows what amazing tech would have come out of The Mill in the coming decade or two if Pfeiffer had not destroyed DEC.

            Once the bean counters gain control tech companies rarely survive in the long term. Wallowing in mediocrity and ruthlessly exploiting the slowly dwindling locked in existing customer base.

            So who exactly is the current CEO of Oracle?

        2. JLV Silver badge

          Re: FALSE...Sun was killed by the $10 stock barrier

          It's hard to take seriously the claim that Sun was killed solely by the "mechanics of stock splits". Or that SUN was very open with Java standards certification for vendors providing alternative Java implementations. SUN... made some major business errors - one of which was ineffective monetization of its unwarrantedly popular language - and was scooped up by Oracle, which certainly wasn't responsible for what had happened to SUN until the time of the acquisition. Another - standard business failure mode 101 by execs - was assuming that the fat cow years of the dot com would always last.

          Heck, 3 months before they got acquired, I recall telling a PeopleSoft colleague who was interviewing with SUN how the business/investment community was not giving SUN a great chance of survival and how he should avoid jumping ship for them. He did not get/pick the job, so dodged that bullet, but SUN was already dead in the water.

          Personally, as someone with extremely little love of Java, big happy popcorn on Oracle's latest move which does seem like it will put a serious damper on my least favorite mainstream language.

      7. RedGreen925 Bronze badge

        Re: FALSE

        "See Cuba, Venezuela where they suffer hunger now."

        See the United States where the parasite capitalists corporations have bought the policies put in place to make certain of that. For the crime of telling the Yankees to go home, leave their countries alone and stop thieving their resources.

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Cuba

          A very poor/starving country because she is run by corrupt ideologoues. They cannot even be as pragmatic as the Chicoms and let SOME entrepreneurship happen.

          Cuba was once a major exporter of coffee, now they are an IMPORTER. Same thing with sugar.

          Now the Commie-Mafia tells Cubans to eat the banana PEEL, too, as it apparently contains some more calories.

          Cuba can easily ship everywhere outside the US and do very nice business. No, they are ruled by a tiny elite of euro-style salloon communists, who all think they should live like a CORRUPT king: no work and live in luxury.

          They dumped Batista and instead got Andropov. With Andropov came the inflexible ideology, laziness and inefficiency.

          1. Shalghar Bronze badge

            Re: Cuba

            It seems you decide to not be aware of the multiple layers of economic warfare coming from the USA that goes against cuba and venezuela as well as quite a few other countries.

            The (not only) economical warfare that the US wields against cuba is sometimes modified a bit but has never ceased since the 1960ies.

            Secondary sanctions that threaten anyone still doing business with US sanctioned entities enlarge the effect of the economic warfare so i wouldnt assume to be able to nail it down solely to cuba / venezuela internal issues when so much pressure from the outside is a permanent standard for decades now. I can naturally not rule out that a lot of their issues has to do with their internal politics but to see whats really at fault, the external pressure needs to cease.

          2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

            Re: Cuba

            Like all Americans they dont actually understand how to judge success and think being rich is a success. THen again they also dont appreciate what being rich means.

            Just look at America, so many poor kids, soo many poor families far more than say NZ. Nobody in NZ suffers because they cant afford to see a doctor. People in NZ get basic rights like actually having a months holiday or rights like not being fired because they needed to stay home because their kid was sick... and yet you want to tell me that America is richer than NZ.

            What you fail to understand is Cuba is a shithole because its an extreme form of where America is trying very hard to go, that is giving all the power to the few, in America you call them few corporations.

      8. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: FALSE

        Do you know what else is socialist ?

        Parents giving babies free food and board. By your logic babies should be paying for their board from day 1 and in america they should also b e paying for the hospital charges when mum visits the hospital for their birth.

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: FALSE

          Be reasonable. Babies can't earn income.

          They should be acquiring debt from day one, which they can repay, with interest, to their parents once they start working a few years later. That's the American way.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: FALSE

            Almost...to be truly American, you have to ensure they can't read or understand the itemised bill when they're old enough so you can jail them for fraud.

      9. jgarbo

        Re: FALSE

        You do understand that Marx was a Capitalist. His Manifesto was a warning to Capitalists, relevant these days, that abusing the (labor) market would turn it against them and look for other means of production more humane. Viz, Oracle...

      10. James Anderson Silver badge

        Re: FALSE

        Sun were pretty solvent when they put themselves up for sale. The cash or cash equivalents number was eye watering.

        Scott McNeally knew he could not compete with Intel, AMD or IBM for the next generation of SPARC do he didn't.

        Not buying Sun after the company had standardised all software development on Java was the first of many serious mistakes by IBM.

      11. JLV Silver badge
        Thumb Down

        Re: FALSE

        As I recall it, SUN put out Java to great fanfare as an open, standards-based, language that everyone should use for everything, everywhere. That was the sales pitch, no?

        Then they spent years denying access to the Java certification test suites (no, nothing to with training) that enabled alternative vendors to assert that they were compliant with the Java standard.

        As someone who just planning bought Gulag Archipelago to re-read it I find your appeal to moral authority via Venezuela to be highly distateful and trivializing of all the victims of real Communism, not whatever trivial economic approach you happen to disagree with (and, yes, Sun did signally fail to generate much value from Java, not least when their reference J2EE server was not considered all that solid, leaving the competition like WebSphere to actually make the big buck$ in production systems).

      12. ragnar

        Re: FALSE

        What does Marx have to do with "giving away software products...totally free"?

        Have you ever actually picked up one of his books?

    3. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

      Re: Another footgun moment

      I mean I gave ya a thumbs up. But if Oracle still has 16% of the customers and are charging 6x as much, they're getting 96% the revenues, they've hit the other side of the demand curve (one peak at high volume/price and one at low volume/high price.) Not that I I think it's a good move but not a total disaster for them either.

    4. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: Another footgun moment

      There are NOT other java implementations, there are other DISTRIBUTIONS. All the distributions offered are identical for a given version.

      Oracles v11.111 is the same as Azuls v11.111.

      Implementation is not the same as distribution.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Another footgun moment

      Virtualbox comes with oracle branding, I use it because it is free unlike vmware.

  2. trevorde Silver badge

    Defies belief

    "... global tech research company Gartner was forecasting that those on the new subscription package would face between two and five times the costs compared with the previous usage-based model"

    Gartner finally gets something right!

    1. DJV Silver badge

      Re: Gartner finally gets something right!

      Throw enough darts at multiple dartboards and the law of averages suggests that a bullseye is likely to be hit once in a while.

      1. Marcelo Rodrigues
        Devil

        Re: Gartner finally gets something right!

        "Throw enough darts at multiple dartboards and the law of averages suggests that a bullseye is likely to be hit once in a while."

        Or "even a broken clock is on time twice a day"

    2. JLV Silver badge

      Re: Defies belief

      You know how even a broken clock is correct twice a day? Gartner's undershoots that by running on military time.

      1. matjaggard

        Re: Defies belief

        They couldn't come up with the "wrong" conclusion due to who this report was funded by.

        I'm not saying Oracle have done anything right ever, but this report is just propaganda funded by Azul.

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Facepalm

    "we have to earn those dollars"

    If you're aware of that, then openly gouging your customers isn't the way to go.

    You have the right to change your prices, but customers require justification in order to subscribe to the change.

    Multiplying by 2 or more is not justifiable.

    1. Rosie Davies

      Re: "we have to earn those dollars"

      Hmmm...my reading of the article is that those are the words of Azul's Scott Sellers rather than anyone who is anything to do with the Big Red Extortion Racket. Could be wrong though.

      Rosie

  4. Bebu
    Windows

    If you intend to...

    charge [more] for an open source, libre software product you really need to add value.

    Clearly just the cachet of using Oracle branded wares doesn't quite add the required value.

  5. DarkMoondevil

    Apparently everybody keeps forgetting OpenJDK is still Oracle.

    1. keithpeter Silver badge
      Windows

      Quote from https://openjdk.org/ embolding mine

      "Oracle’s free, GPL-licensed, production-ready OpenJDK JDK 22 binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows are available at jdk.java.net/22; Oracle’s commercially-licensed JDK 22 binaries, based on the same code, are here."

      The GPL-licensed bit is the point I think.

      1. damiandixon

        You can still use openjdk to run commercial software.

        The code for openjdk may be GPL V2 but there is an exception that allows it's use.

        IMNAL so if you really need to satisfy legal t&c pay for legal advice.

        1. Marcelo Rodrigues

          "The code for openjdk may be GPL V2 but there is an exception that allows it's use."

          GPL V2 doesn't forbid commercial use. It has several restrictions of what we can do with the code - but commercial use isn't one of them.

      2. Avalanche

        The OpenJDK project is under the stewardship of Oracle, but also has other contributors. And those contributors represent companies and projects that deliver their own OpenJDK builds, like Azul, Microsoft, Eclipse Adoptium, Red Hat and others. Switching to OpenJDK does not necessarily mean switching to the Oracle build of OpenJDK, especially not if you actually want support, because Oracle does not provide support for their OpenJDK build, but (some of) those other companies/projects do for their builds.

    2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      it may have an oracle license header, but they cant change the licensing because its GPL.

  6. Andy Mac
    Facepalm

    No-one got fired for choosing Oracle…

    …but plenty of people have been “asked to resign”

    1. fg_swe Silver badge

      Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

      ...by Socialism. See Cuba and Venezuela.

      Oracle meanwhile provides 170 000 well-paid, solid jobs for their employees. These people can afford good apartments, good and plenty of food, health insurance and at least one yearly vaction.

      It is always amazing how supposedly well-educated engineers and technicians can be stubborn 1di0ts.

      1. Munchausen's proxy

        Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

        I'm having some trouble following your thought process here. Are you saying the citizens of Venezuela would be less hungry if they were giving more money to Larry Ellison?

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

          Oracle is a well functioning economic (sub-)system. SUN, Cuba and Venezuela are very bad, socialist failures.

          1. David 132 Silver badge

            Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

            >Oracle is a well functioning economic (sub-)system.

            So is the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta. What's your point, exactly?

            1. fg_swe Silver badge

              Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

              Oracle is under the full control of the U.S. and other governments. Unlike the Mafia they do not take law into their own hands. They do not threaten your or your family's life.

              If you do not like to do business with Oracle, just remove all of their products from your computers and they won't bother you.

              Then go to IBM for DB/2 and you will prolly have an unpleasant surprise. Harder to install (you need an IBM engineer for that) and most likely not cheaper.

              If you do not like the Linux/Java combo, give AS/400+RPG a try. Definitely more expensive and surely locked in as much as locking can go.

      2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

        yeh 170k well paid jobs and how many millions of beggars in the street because they got ripped off ?

        Is that the story of the us healthcare ? Thousands of well paid executives running those hospitals and tens of millions of americans working 3 jobs, never being able to have a day off and probably dying young from lack of rest and exhaustion ?

        America the land where the rich people kick some unlucky barstard not once, but every day for the rest of their life until they die.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

        "These people can afford good apartments, good and plenty of food, health insurance and at least one yearly vaction."

        How old are you?

  7. Cruachan Bronze badge

    Oracle have always been like this with their licensing (see what happened to Wiggle recently for example). Hope Broadcom are reading this because their behaviour towards VMware customers is very similar, and they're banking that enough won't move to Hyper-V or another alternative.

    1. fg_swe Silver badge

      Guess What ?

      Oracle is financially strong and stable, BECAUSE they ensure payment on their products.

      SUN meanwhile went bankrupt on socialist ideology of "give away complex products for free, because this is the latest fancy ideology".

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Guess What ?

        Please put your strawman away. No one here is arguing for everything to be free. This is about companies taking rational decisions based on price hikes. Other alternatives, including those with paid support, are available and the market seems to think they offer better value: that's called capitalism.

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: Guess What ?

          Please put your strawman away.

          Good luck with that; look at whom you're responding to.

          Really it's a wonder we haven't been treated to a rant about how Oracle + Sappeur will be the salvation of humanity.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Guess What ?

        They will only remain financially stable and strong while customers, current and potential, view their prices and terms affordable. If you're one of those 170,000 you might consider what might happen to you when, as seems to be happening, customers stop holding that view.

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Exactly

          This massive corporation now had a run of more than 40 years, which went very well. From 2 guys to 170 000 well-paid employees. Their products are used in lots of large corporations. Some of these installations can be replaced by Postgresql and Python. By a massive Rust rewrite.

          But guess what ? Larry and his lieutenants will decrease prices IF+WHEN customers really start dropping Oracle. So far it seems customers are overall happy with the arrangement. The rantings of engineers and technicians on the internet matter very little. What matters is that Oracle wins in the comparison ORA|DB2|MSSQL|PSQL or JAVA|RUST|VWST|DELPHI|C#, done by engineering and business managers. So far they seem to do quite well.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Exactly

            So far it seems customers are overall happy with locked into the arrangement. Don't dismiss those engineers and technicians who are, in your words, ranting on the internet. Some of them may actually be today's decision makers. Some of them may be influencing today's decision makers. Some of them may be tomorrow's decision makers. By the time Oracle actually see customers dropping them there'll have been a lot of commitments made, plans worked out and projects well advanced. It will be too late to drop prices.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Exactly

            Wondering why all these posts from fg_swe? No more than bitter failed java programmer now peddling a substandard rust compiler.

      3. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Guess What ?

        You might also want to stop misstating your facts. Sun had a serious decline. That's a point in your favor. Why make your argument weaker by stating incorrectly that they went bankrupt?

        Of course, it's also suggesting that Sun's problems were due primarily to Java, rather than any of their other products that didn't go well, but that's not something you've bothered to mention in your comments.

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Java Business

          1.) I guess that at least 50% of large businesses (more than 1 billion revenue) run some type of Java Software. From Eclipse to SAP to Oracle apps.

          2.) SUN could easily have transformed herself into a Software Business IF they had demanded, from 2003 onwards, moderate license fees for the Java Compiler, the VM, the JRE and so on. Think of 30 Euros per core per year.

          3.) SUN would be a sustainable business and ideally a good steward of Java.

          It's a shame they went under after making such a nice contribution to applied computer science.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Java Business

            "SUN could easily have transformed herself into a Software Business IF they had demanded, from 2003 onwards, moderate license fees for the Java Compiler, the VM, the JRE and so on. Think of 30 Euros per core per year."

            Or they could find that people didn't want to and were getting rather tired of being charged. So they stop developing their software in Java, so their customers stop buying JRE licenses. Now they've lost some JDK and JRE licenses. This, in turn, means that the businesses get less value from the licenses they retain, and they start migrating away from Java-based tools. That could happen as well.

            It should be rather obvious that it's a possibility if we consider other prices. Had it been €30k per core per year, that would happen almost immediately. Lower the prices and the number of customers you lose decreases and the time between the price change and the loss lengthens. You assume that €30/core/year would be low enough that people wouldn't switch, but Sun's assumptions could easily have been different based on better information about who they would be asking to pay and how much benefit they were already receiving. Pricing is hard, and it can be far too easy to assume that what you would be willing to pay will work for the rest of the market. Oracle is trying this today, but that's no more guarantee that it will work for them.

            Sun also had to work around licensing issues meaning they couldn't just apply a unilateral change in terms to every customer overnight. They had to do that because, earlier on, they gave terms that caused people to use the language and they had to. Otherwise, a SaaS business that runs lots of servers and therefore would bear the license increase you describe themselves would have seen Java as too risky a solution and wouldn't use it in the first place. That means fewer developers being paid to learn Sun's language, fewer libraries being made available, which means fewer people choosing to start by learning Java, which means fewer people choosing it in new builds and more people choosing competitors, and all of that means fewer customers for any commercial products Sun did want people to buy. They chose to provide free access, not because they were convinced by an ideological point, but to quickly build up a customer base.

  8. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    You can increase fees only when you increase value

    EOM

    1. Grunchy Silver badge

      Re: You can increase fees only when you increase value

      This is a “dead cat” bounce. The manager in charge, faced with simultaneous need for revenue and dwindling customers, decides the 50% remaining customers will have to pay 2x the cost to maintain the original cash flow. The dead cat only has enough momentum for one bounce.

      (The vendor can also use pricing to push customers to one preferred product, eg. when DOS came out IBM sold that for $40 while charging $240 for CP/M. Why did they do that, well, must have been because they preferred vending DOS.)

    2. Mister Jones

      Re: You can increase fees only when you increase value

      No.....you forgot about "increasing fear"...........fear that moving from today's platform might be more risky than paying Larry Ellison!!!!!!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    About Larry Ellison..........................

    Take a look at recent events in Birmingham.

    Larry needs the money for his Americas Cup stuff.......pity about the folk elsewhere who are footing the bill!!!!

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. ICL1900-G3 Silver badge

        Re: About Larry Ellison..........................

        FFS... Change the fucking record!

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Re: About Larry Ellison..........................

          Ok, so Birmingham has two issues:

          -knife slashing

          -a failed Oracle sort-of-ERP introduction

  10. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
    FAIL

    Run Oracle Run! (time environment)

    Why are devs not being fired en masse for developing on Java? That must be the trashiest technology on offer today. In this week I wanted to install SonarLint in VS Code. That thing tells me it needs JRE-11 (or later). I ask the support guy to install JRE-21. Doesn't work. Try JRE-22. Doesn't work. Try latest JRE-1.8. Doesn't work. SonarLint absolutely insists that it wants to see JRE-11 (or later). Then I gave up JRE-11 is not available for download anymore. And what's the chance it would have worked anyway?

    1. fg_swe Silver badge

      Et Voila

      https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk11-archive-downloads.html

    2. Avalanche

      Re: Run Oracle Run! (time environment)

      Java 11 is still supported and available for download:

      Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/#java11

      Eclipse Adoptium: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=11

      and many others.

    3. The Velveteen Hangnail

      Re: Run Oracle Run! (time environment)

      While Java definitely deserves some of the blame for the example you're describing, the issue is more a matter of bad developers, not the language. They don't code properly, they abandon their code base... there's lots of reasons. And very often the choice of using java in the first place isn't even theirs. It's management, or the client.

      Java is far from the only language that suffers from this. Python is an easy example of the same issue. Heck, the issue is so bad, in fact, that we now have things like venv and pipx to deal with it. Any language that goes through major revisions, that deprecates previous functionality, is going to run into this issue. The issue is that much more pronounced when said language crams everything and the kitchen sink into it's distribution (ie: what java does).

  11. Herring` Silver badge

    All you need to know

    about Oracle is that there are consultancies who are making money advising other companies how to navigate the Oracle licensing.

  12. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Clarity

    Oracle (or should I say Larry Ellison) always had a very simple mantra for their products: "We're either gonna make boatloads of money from this or we throw it into the garbage can!" They ditched OpenOffice because they knew they couldn't compete with Microsoft's Office. But Java, being ubiquitous in businesses around the world, stood a chance of making them money. The only drawback is that an open-source implementation of Java exists (OpenJDK) which thwarts their devilish plans to milk companies for all they've got.

    MySQL is still a question mark They're not making nearly as much money off the database as they'd like, but they're holding onto it...for now.

    There's a good chance Oracle will eventually ditch Java and hand it off to some foundation.

  13. James O'Shea Silver badge

    Larry Ellison

    More Evil(tm) than Apple, Adobe, Dell, Google, HP and Microsoft. Combined.

  14. Groo The Wanderer

    I've always been amazed that people would pay so much for something you can get for free. As far as I can tell, the primary purpose of paying is so you have someone to sue if things head south.

    1. Shalghar Bronze badge

      Except you dont necessarily have anyone to sue. When reading most of the license "agreements" there are even things like "not guaranteed to be fit for ANY (!) purpose" buried within.

      And heres oracles license disagreement with its statement for liability:

      https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/javase-license1.html

      "Disclaimer of Warranties; Limitation of Liability THE PROGRAMS ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. ORACLE FURTHER DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS AND IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NONINFRINGEMENT......."

      There is one of many interesting discussions here:

      https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/1410/do-warranty-disclaimers-in-software-licenses-carry-any-legal-weight

      So what about the currernt outages, caused by software malfunctions. Anyone seen any lawsuits so far ?

      I am sure the older readers are still remembering that software cannot be reliable because its so complicated. I am still glad that manufacturers of cars, planes or nuclear power plants are somehow not able to use this excuse.

  15. xyz123 Silver badge

    Government Department I work for totally dropped ALL forms of Java and has rebuilt all their software using alternate languages.

    Because Oracle demanded licensing of Java of $443,000,000 PER YEAR

    They dropped the ball when they sent us documentation and accidentally included minutes of a meeting where they literally said

    "these guys are government, they'll roll over like puppies. We can fuck them as deeply and for as much as we want"

  16. O'Reg Inalsin

    Unbiased report?

    The research was sponsored by Azul, a company that provides support for open source Java platforms.

    I'm all for OpenJDK, and I hope Azul and it employees can make it work for them, but have to take the numbers with a pinch of salt.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Storm in a Java coffee cup

    Just stay on a supported Java version and it's free - more move to the Java to Oracle's Cloud and it is supported

    The comms seem poor on this - I think they just want people to move off the old sh1t and they have shown the stick but not the carrot

  18. Smartypantz

    Its the tooling stupid

    I have never understood why the different stewards of Java (Sun, Oracle) did not create the tooling needed to use this great runtime. This was obviously the way to make money on java. Just like Microsoft does with Visual studio and all of that ecosystem (.NET CLR is "free" but the tooling end frameworking is not).

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