back to article Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red

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 …

  1. Caspian Prince

    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.

    1. Michael Strorm Silver badge

      Re: Not fooling anyone

      If that wasn't the reason for that tenth person, my guess would have been Stockholm syndrome...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not fooling anyone

        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.

        1. vekkq

          Re: Not fooling anyone

          Can't blame a business person for thinking that a product with a price tag is better. Not like they had any other method to measure it than in money.

          1. FirstTangoInParis Silver badge

            Re: Not fooling anyone

            Free product v one with a price tag ….. surprisingly I’ve known teams select paid for products over free because then they can go after the vendor if things go wrong.

            1. JulieM Silver badge

              Re: Not fooling anyone

              And how many historical cases are there of that happening?

              It literally says in every EULA that the supplier of the software accepts no responsibility for anything that happens to users.

          2. CRConrad

            Re: "Can't blame a business person..."

            Oh yes we can! YTF not?!?

            Just because theyr'e "a business person" doesn't make a blameworthy idiot any less of a blameworthy idiot.

        2. David 132 Silver badge

          Re: Not fooling anyone

          > “…gets handed a multi-million £ contract, and bankrupts a local authority.”

          You forgot “…followed by a knighthood or elevation to the House of Lords”.

    2. Steve Channell
      Windows

      GraalVM is not free

      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

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Maybe you want to support the ongoing development of OpenJDK? It would be illuminating to compare the number of commits from Oracle to the number of commits from Azul.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        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.

      2. Natewrench

        What can you replace Java with that is Minecraft compatible I guess but not open jdk

        1. malfeasance

          MS openjdk

          Doesn’t Minecraft launcher come bundled with the Microsoft openjdk build. So Minecraft’s already oracle free?

          If you are running a Minecraft server then I imagine sourcing the ms openjdk for Linux (it exists cos they recommend it for azure) would be the play.

          1. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

            Re: MS openjdk

            Unless it's rotted some, the last time I ran a Minecraft server it was quite happy on a Debian box with OpenJDK.

  3. Snake Silver badge

    Americans and [our] money

    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.

    1. TVU

      Re: Americans and [our] money

      This is a case where anticompetitive Oracle should not have been permitted to acquire Sun Microsystems in the first place (same applies to the Red Hat and VMware takeovers).

  4. JLV Silver badge

    Meanwhile one can only guess what it means for the popularity of starting out new projects or businesses based on Java, the language.

    Are we moving into "COBOL of the 21st century" mode?

    1. abend0c4 Silver badge

      COBOL is going to be around until the heat death of the Universe. And even that might not kill it.

      1. JLV Silver badge
        Pint

        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.

        1. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
          FAIL

          Java peaked at around 1.6. Since then, the feature-creatures have been at it and the syntax has become Baroque.

    2. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge
      Windows

      "COBOL of the 21st century"

      I was thinking more like: The IE6 of the 21st century?

  5. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Keep on shooting yourself in the foot Oracle

    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.

  6. JulieM Silver badge

    Nice opportunity

    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?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: might some of them be able to get away with LibreOffice?

      Probably most of them until....

      Hey Customer. We see that you are not using our office products any longer. Because of that we are increasing your subscription by 200%. Sign here.

      1. JulieM Silver badge

        Re: might some of them be able to get away with LibreOffice?

        Dear Microsoft,

        Now you have effectively hiked the subscription for your software above the cost of paying someone to do it by hand, that is exactly what we are going to do from now on.

    2. cookiecutter

      Re: Nice opportunity

      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

      1. JulieM Silver badge

        Re: Nice opportunity

        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.

  7. Lee D Silver badge

    You know the saying that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM?

    I want to know where there isn't an equivalent saying:

    Everybody should get fired if they chose Oracle.

    1. Dinanziame Silver badge
      Go

      And these days, IBM as well!

  8. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

    Per employee?

    Does that include the janitorial staff?

    1. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: Per employee?

      Well yes, duh, of course the janitorial staff! What if you have an Evil Maid who runs Java based malware on your equipment? Your organisation will be guilty of using unlicensed software.

      1. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

        Re: Per employee?

        "What if you have an Evil Maid"

        Not the sort of Evil Maid I was hoping for.

  9. Matthew "The Worst Writer on the Internet" Saroff

    How does Oracle stay in business when its business model is to fsck its customers like a drunk sorority girl?

    They are worse than Broadcom.

    1. Dinanziame Silver badge
      Trollface

      Oracle doesn't have customers

      They have hostages

  10. rcxb Silver badge

    Non-Oracle Java

    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/

  11. frankvw

    " Fallout continues from per-employee licensing shift"

    I must confess that "shift¨was not the word that I initially read in that heading...

    1. FirstTangoInParis Silver badge

      Re: " Fallout continues from per-employee licensing shift"

      Great minds mis-read alike!

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