Not fooling anyone
And that one guy in 10 always looked suspiciously like Larry, wearing a false nose & moustache and glasses, intoning, "I'd like to stay with Oracle!" in various different comedy accents.
Only around one in ten Oracle Java customers are likely to stick around following costly licensing changes Big Red made to its development and runtime environments in January 2023, according to research. A report from Dimensional Research found the percentage of Oracle Java users considering switching to alternative JVMs or …
There's an entire side of IT (that ends up costing end-consumers and tax payers £££££) that exists purely so that individual members of middle-management don't have to take responsibility for their own shortcomings when it all goes tits up.
"No no, we can't possibly use Postgres (free), we MUST use Oracle DB (£££££)"
6 months later, when the project is falling apart, and the shit has inevitably hit the fan...
"Not my fault gov. Look at all this money we gave Oracle. Blame then. Oh, by the way, as this project was successful for 6 months I'm now an "Oracle expert", so another mug has offered to double my salary. Good luck with your failing project.Toodles!."
Eventually, Mr Peter-Principle "Oracle Expert" middle-management makes it into the public sector, gets handed a multi-million £ contract, and bankrupts a local authority.
Depending on your deployment scenario, it might be worth coughing up for an Oracle license - The GraalVM is only available for a fee, and might save of cloud hosting fees...
.. but if you wanted to save on hosting costs, you might be better migrating to C#
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/java-graalvm.html
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/java.html
It’s probably good to mention that all Java runtimes are based on the same OpenJDK sources. What you buy is some extra features like rapid start, or better management of huge amounts of memory. And of course support. But everything that is Java runs on all distributions.
I’ve always wondered why people, given the option, chose Oracle. Far better to pick something like Azul where you are an actual customer buying their core product.
Fair point. Oracle and IBM/Red Hat are the big ones.
I’m just not that grateful to Oracle - I think just about any decently sized organization could be steward of OpenJDK. For Oracle the control is has over Java is already worth a lot as a lot of their stack requires it. Squeezing the users for the money will just scare the c-suite away from Java entirely (and yes, I do hear a lot of people thinking good riddance). And that is a shame since for all Java’s flaws it has been very stable for a very long time.
Rent seeking is become its own life form, from the way that corporate America is abusing it across every aspect of American life. Oracle, Broadcom, Netflix, Fubu and Hulu, Big Agra, Big Pharma, RealPage-subscribing landlords...
But since Greed is Good in America, I'll have to add: Let Them Eat Cake.
I did not mean as criticism of COBOL. I've coded professionally in COBOL and while it is a bit tedious and limited, it is also quite capable. My biggest beef is the lack of a standard library: wanna left pad with spaces? Loop you write, grasshopper, and no npm package written by a disgruntled Turkish dude in sight. On the plus side, if you are into code generation, COBOL is a very nice target. And, like C, it is very quick to get your head around the small basic functionality and to get coding (while memory safe). The PIC variable overlay system is a bit weird to wrap your head around, but powerful too.
On the other hand, I've only taken classes in Java to be bring me up to relatively good level of proficiency and.... eeek. Everything rubs me the wrong way, from the original lack of a file copy (write your own, the system could run out of disk! think network abstraction!), to the aversion to interop with anything (everything should be in Java, dammit!), pretending the OS's functionality and API doesn't exist (don't break the abstraction! everything Java!) to having to catch and declare exceptions everywhere, no functions, not passing around methods as parameters, to AbstractFactoryConcreteInjectors gooblygook to - by design - requiring files in the hundreds and thousands via one-class-per-file. Not dynamic enough? I know, let's add honking big XML blobs to control code behavior.
With the final straw being a class on the original Enterprise Edition and its EJB - the notion that there is value to default to spawning low level atomic SQL objects anywhere in the network of nodes flies in the face of my decades of experience writing SQL code: when performance is critical you want to run it as close to the database server as possible, all together and in fact eschew most of the language fluff like ORMs and instead run set based operations on said database server. That need not mean stored procedure, but it does mean something like "update customer set active = 0 where unpaid > 1000.00", rather than looping on "select customer_id where unpaid > 1000.00" and then updating via a host of sad lil distributed EJBs. When the reality hit the theory, the theory folded and EJBs aren't that used in production, from what I gather.
Long story short: there is not enough popcorn in the world to keep me while I am watching this extended session of foot-bazookaing by Java's leadership.
And I rather like COBOL ;-)
But I do believe enterprise Java code will also remain in production for decades. It will just be in a different context than what all those who thought Java would take over the world thought would happen.
You had a nice captive audience and then the quest to monetize everything got in the way.
Now you will see reducing revenues from Java.
Then people will think again about ERP etc.
For a company that started by 'fixing' a feature with an IBM OS it would be sweet justice and that is coming from a former Oracle DBA.
DIE ORACLE and sooner rather than later.
This would be a nice opportunity for a few people to earn a bit of money, setting themselves up as consultants to help businesses migrate away from Oracle Java to Open Source alternatives.
Nine times out of ten, OpenJRE Just Works™.
Oh, and while we're still here, do all these people really need Microsoft Office installed on their machines, or might some of them be able to get away with LibreOffice?
Have you SEEN what happens to the office drones when microsoft change the colour of something..it's like the world has ended. Imagine your average finance or HR drone having to create a document in libra office. It's essentially identical but "WE MUST HAVE WORD!!!" Ideally on a Mac.
I'm glad I won't be doing helpdesk when 11 gets rolled out to the enterprise....."but but but THE START BUTTON IS IN THE MIDDLE!!!"
How many large firms are out there where there is ONE finance spreadsheet that essentially runs the whole firm & finance zombies just pop in numbers & take the output blindly to feed upwards. One dude 20 years ago who could read created it & now no one knows what it does, how it works, that's there's a bunch of cells setup for text rather than numbers and there is a null value on the 40th sheet.
Imagine asking someone who put "data & excel expert" on the CV to get that working in Libra
The number of CVs I have seen (in response to an advertisement that specifically said "No Microsoft Word documents") laid out to fit 216*279 paper, using spaces for positioning, random font changes as opposed to stylesheets and claiming "intermediate to advanced" MS Office skills would turn your hair grey.
Even for old platforms there OpenJDK builds out there, they're just difficult to find:
https://github.com/alexkasko/openjdk-unofficial-builds#openjdk-unofficial-installers-for-windows-linux-and-mac-os-x
https://github.com/ojdkbuild/ojdkbuild
https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html
https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/downloads/
https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/