Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime Oracle stands accused of "predatory" licensing tactics after making changes to the Oracle Java SE subscription model that could force businesses to pay tens of thousands of dollars more each month for running the same software. Industry experts have pointed out that businesses with limited Java use would have to license the …
(director approaches an employee who is staring at Eclipse and looking tired)
(director angrily waves a bill from Oracle) Do you see how much it costs me to have you here? You could at least type faster! Show me your spreadsheet with the coffee you drank this week!
(employee opens up a spreadsheet)
(director) oh gawd dammit that like £20 worth of coffee!!!
(employee) sir, with all respect, if you filter the spreadsheet by owner you'll see that I bought this coffee myself!
(director) and who pays you so you have all that money, huh?
(employee) well...
(director) what? do you have a side hustle?
(employee) about that...
(director) oh lord, I am losing money by even talking to you!
(employee) just... that umm...
(director) YOU ARE FIRED STEVE!
(employee) my name is Derek
(director) DEREK YOU ARE FIRED TOO!
(director makes a mark on the Oracle invoice and mumbles two more losers to go mhmhmhmhmhmhm)
But if we set up the tea lady as Darjeeling & Java Services Limited as its sole employee and mandate that only she be allowed to serve then might the licence fee become bearable? Oh, one can periodically liquidate the company (not the tea lady) when you don't want to pay invoices.
Which raises the question - does Twitter have any legacy licences that Elon isn't paying? Would be fun, especially for the lawyers' relief fund, if they had to slug it out in court.
Oracle did that to the vast corporate octopus I work for a couple of years ago, gambling that it would be too hard and expensive for us to ditch them, but we're in the process of doing exactly that.
The rumour was that we spent about $US25 million per year with Oracle for the Asia Pacific region which has now been entirely moved to SAP (which is a whole other story).
Dictators? Even they pay attention to the Spanish Inquisition[Oracle Audit]. Apart from may be with Kim Jung Un - the Oracle lawyers probably don't step inside that country (on official business), lest they get used for mortar target practice. icon -->
Given their predatory practices I would not touch their Linux with a bargepole, especially at work.
I did experiment with their OEL 8 release on an old Atom box. It ran okay (slow, but it was an Atom), so I tried their Unbreakable kernel. This fell over regularly with illegal instructions, and utterly hosed the RPM database.
Nuked the installation, and installed AlmaLinux 8, and haven't looked back.
At my new employer, we have standardised on AlmaLinux 9.
I recall hearing recently something along the lines of- assuming you'd made the mistake of having signed up with Oracle in the first place- the contract you agreed to states that in the event of switching to another compatible variant, you're still required to pay Oracle their fees regardless.
I also vaguely recall that this clause was indefinite(?)
(Perhaps someone else can clarify and/or correct this if it's wrong).
I had my suspicions on that count too, but let's bear in mind that you'd likely have to put the effort (and quite possibly a lot of money) even taking it to court to get them to agree with that, if they did.
Something I suspect Oracle (and countless other manufacturers' unenforceable contracts) rely upon.
Then there's also Oracle's modus operandi of having licensing that's opaque and convoluted enough that there's always some other missed infringement they can catch you out with if you piss them off and they decide (coincidentally, cough) that they fancy auditing you. (Whether that's actually the case or not doesn't really matter so long as the customer isn't clear, and I get the impression their sales people use that as a barely-veiled threat often enough).
Oracle's "perpetual license" means that you pay Oracle a sum (fixed by Oracle) on a regular basis (also fixed by Oracle), for perpetuity (unless Oracle manage to extend its duration).
Note: In Oracle linguo, "fixed" means "can be revised at anytime".
> I had my suspicions on that count too, but let's bear in mind that you'd likely have to put the effort (and quite possibly a lot of money) even taking it to court to get them to agree with that, if they did.
Right, perfectly valid for SMEs. But don't forget here we are also talking about mult-billion dollar companies being affected, and even more affected that would likely be willing to take Oracle to court. I work for an organisatoin that has over 20,000 employees. A few years ago when Oracle first came calling about Java licensing, we spent millions migrating to non-Oracle JDKs (e.g. J9), and reducing as much as possible where we have Oracle Java installed - we used to have it on every users desktop for browser-based apps that required Java. In some places we couldn't get rid of it entirely, at least easily, as it was required for things like SAP etc. in browsers that required Oracle Java for some reason. However, because of this, we managed to reduce the licensing hugely because we only had to pay per installation/active user. So we ended up paying like 200 or 300 user license for it. But now> if we have to pay licenses for the entire 20,000 staff? My organisation has revenues of 10's of billions of dollars. We also use other Oracle products extensively, like the Oracle DBMS. But we also have a lot of DB2 and SQL Server. And we are in the midst of migrating a lot of stuff into a hybrid/on-prem cloud infrastructure, which would be a perfect time to rip out Oracle products in favour of alternatives such as DB2 or Postgres were it makes sense.
And in some legislations, an invalid clause actually renders the whole contract invalid, meaning if that clause was invalid they can't sue you for anything else either.
(Can't remember where - it was an offhand remark by a lecturer during a-level law)
El Reg said:
The shift would penalize companies which had spent years minimizing their Java usage
Actually it puts them in a very good position, and incentivises them to finish the job properly.
(Not necessarily to minimise Java as such, but Java SE and anything else with an Oracle license)
Most contracts written with a minimum level of competency will include a salvatorial clause. If any clause in the contract is deemed invalid, that does not invalidate the rest of the contract and the other clauses will remain in effect. This is contract basics so I am sure that Oracle will include it.
At my previous employer, Oracle were attempting to shake us down for Java licensing. We screenshotted their slide which showed the cut-off versions of Java, newer versions were chargeable, older ones weren't. Our Linux estate was already OpenJDK as switching to that resolved an issue with the Oracle versions, and Windows was running older versions being compliant with not needing a subscription (and the slide showed us how far we could update to without needing to subscribe). When they then decided to audit us, they were unhappy, as every single Java instance was outside their licensing scheme and they had to admit that we were fine to carry on as we were.
Agreed. This IS NOT NEW(S)...
I'm just surprised that it has taken them so long to get around to doing this to Java.
For whom the bell tolls, Java, your grave awaits thee.
The death knell for Java in the enterprise even if you don't use an Oracle version.
If the likes of IBM were smart, they'd advertise the hell out of the fact that they have their own version of Java but they won't.
Java has a lot of public contributions in it, including contributions from very big companies. Oracle can't take it over.
Stop using Oracle's Java. That's it. There was a time when their implementation was too superior to pass up, but those years are long gone and Oracle is just predatory lawyers.
That would be a point if:
Java was made open source in 2005, as part of publishing solaris soruce code, before being made closed source when Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, then forked as part of OpenSolaris, to continue its development as an open source project, including ongoing development of/away from the original code base.
ZFS is desirable in Linux for reasons of technical merit, but as closed source, that's physically impossible.
I haven't seen any credible legal opinion on the risk of putting OpenZFS into the Kernel ( and to assist those googling a link to the Linus diatribe, that's not a legal opinoin - it's a management risk position statement, and he does not address OpenZFS ).
Linux users are entirely at liberty to build ZFS from Source Code and link it against their kernel, with the blessing of both sets of authors -- however, the resulting code cannot be distributed in a way that satisfies both licences: Linux is GPL2 while ZFS is CDDL. Both licences essentially boil down to "Not sharing is stealing"; but each licence considers the other just far enough removed from sharing as freely as originally envisaged by the licence creator to count as an unacceptable additional restriction.
Every GNU/Linux system already includes the full development toolchain, it would not be difficult to create a package which would automatically download the ZFS Source Code, compile and install it; and there is no reason why this should be any different, from the user's point of view, than downloading a pre-compiled kernel image with ZFS support, especially if the Source Code and all intermediate files are deleted after they are no longer needed.
It's very hard to see what harm would be caused by distributing the type of pre-compiled package specifically not allowed by the intersection of the two licences, if the distributor has made the Source Code and build instructions available as required.
It's the same sort of scam where Oracle demands you license the Oracle DB across *all* cores of a VCenter deployment, even if it will only run on a single set of 4 cores no matter what. Oh, you have another VCenter also running v7.0, so you can move VMs between VCenter instances using VMotion? I think you'll need to license that cluster as well. Oh wait, you don't have that setup, doesn't matter, you *might* have it setup and we can't have that.
And this is for a piece of software which is developed on Postgresql and is a supported DB by the vendor. But since our DBAs only know Oracle... we go through this shit all the time.
This is why Oracle is going the way of the mainframe and min-computer vendors, they're going to get eaten alive from the bottom end.
You mean this, right ? https://jhdba.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/oracle-car-parking/
Of course, this is the same happening again. Following this, some time ago, I have yet to meet any company that will view Oracle DB as anything but expensive legacy we do everything to get rid of.
The AS400 of the DB. And no, I really don't think having Oracle DBAs is any excuse to even favour Oracle DB anymore.
Right now, people should really f***k off Java right away !
Unfortunately that's the same bullshit that Microsoft pull on Microsoft SQL Server - license it for every conceivable core you have, not the ones that it is assigned to. I wouldn't mind if it were limited in a license to run on, for example, 12 cores because that was what was licensed, but when a VM estate has 100 cores Microsoft demanding that MS-SQL server is licensed for every single one of them regardless is pretty much a shake down job.
I hope this will start a stampede towards .NET and C#. Oracle's predatory practices have been well documented for decades. Oracle's mantra is: "We make a boatload of money from it or we kill it!"
I suppose they've come to the conclusion they can empty their customers' pockets and they'll accept it, albeit with grinding teeth.
Well, they'll change its name every 5 minutes for a start. :-) Then there's the bits that don't work yet.. VS2022 SSIS for example. And then there was that bug in. NET 4.5 that nearly royally shafted me and they still haven't fixed it. Who knew if you used a system font on IIS and sent stuff to a print server, it would render (just) the numbers in some weird shit typeface? E. G. Times New Roman words then 20 in weird sans serif bold crap then back to Times New Roman.
That'll be trading a devil for an imp, not much of an improvement and the imp has dreams of being a devil herself one day.
On a more serious note, .Net isn't as flexible as Java (though it does need a lot less boilerplate). In fact there's no official desktop GUI toolkit for Linux. They will try to force you into using their other properties, esp. if you are on a platform that they believe has the potential to compete with them. Windows is the primary OS, Microsoft SQL is the primary database, Azure is the primary cloud, anything else you'll have to do it yourself. Oh, as demonstrated with their attempt to pull features from the 'open source' version, reserving it for Visual Studio, they are not above sabotaging .Net if they think it might give them a commercial advantage.
Java, ever since Oracle took ownership, has been a disaster in waiting, if not in practice.
.Net isn't your savior, it's just another commercial enterprise trying to bait the trap with open source goodies.
If you are deep into Java, then switch to a true open source version, as others have mentioned, there are commercial entities that will provide support, for a price if you are nervous.
If you want to truly be free, take this opportunity to switch to a truly open language. There are plenty to choose from and more cropping up every day; JavaScript, Python, PHP, C, C++, FORTRAN, Rust, etc. etc.
aye - we had a sales guy coming to us with some oracle software as he had some existing relationship with them and they were helping with a bid. To a man, everyone in my team told 'em 'over our collective dead bodies are we buying oracle anything'. The old adage that they don't have customers, they have hostages was brought up a few times...
Thé stuff you find on the web to do with creating Android software has a very definite change that has gone over to Kotlin. Early stuff is Java but it seems to have almost disappeared.
We purged Oracle. All DBs, including MySQL, all Java all gone. The only thing I miss is VirtualBox but using it would be paying too high a price.
I feel huge disappointment every time I hear somebody has chosen Oracle but I guess nobody is going to help a competitor by warning them.
I know journalism's struggling to attract readers these days but outright lies? Come on. Oracle? What are the chances that Oracle of all companies is engaging in predatory licensing? Next you'll be suggesting Microsoft might consider abusing their monopolistic position or that Google are indifferent to the their users' suffering.
When Oracle sees a mass migration to completely eliminate all use of their product, I am expecting their "model" will change.
Amazon Coretto is the choice for at least one global company I recently worked for.
https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/?filtered-posts.sort-by=item.additionalFields.createdDate&filtered-posts.sort-order=desc
I've been running a Java ISV for 20+ years. In all that time we've had customers using the "IBM solution" (WebSphere), Weblogic (when it was still BEA), and now Amazon Coretto comes up a bit. But I think I can count the number of times we've had customers asking whether we support Oracles commercial offerings on one hand. Which is doubly odd as Oracle is one of our customers.
I'm sure some people are paying for Java, but as best as I can tell they're not paying Oracle.
Because Oracle is the sort of company that once the "founder" dies it will quickly unravel when the extent of his families looting of the company becomes public. Just based on the public lawsuits brought against him over the years it must be many billions of dollars. Many many billions. This is quite separate from the stock angle. Larry Ellison was always just a slight classier version of Jack Tramiel. And once Tramiel was ousted from Commodore the extend of just how much money had been stolen through the Bermuda "HQ" became public knowledge and Commodore just hobbled on for a while before collapsing. The Amiga just postponing the inevitable.
Larry's 78. So another few years and he is gone.
As I explained in 2013 to one of the Kiwi Americas Cup Team sailors as they were grabbing a coffee in Potrero Hill in SF - everyone, and I mean, everyone hates Larry Ellison. Not just people in the business. And everyone, all the locals, wanted the Kiwi team to beat Ellison's boat. Just because it was Ellisons boat. They almost did it too. There were a lot of sad faces in SF when the Kiwis lost the last race. And a lot of happy faces when the Kiwis finally won in 2017. Because Ellison lost. Could not buy yet another victory.
Every time Larry loses it makes the world a slightly happier place. And when Larry finally goes to meet his maker, in Hell, it will definitely make the world a much better place. Because for some people their life goal seems to be - Lets Do Evil. Whenever and wherever we can. Its certainly a motto Larry seems to have lived by since the 1970's. If you have ever been in Oracle Towers in Redwood Shores you will know just what I mean. Makes Redmond feel like the Magic Kingdom. That bad.
1.) If Mr Ellison is such a brute, how come all those corporations license his products ?
1.2) Why doesn't everybody just use PostgreSQL and Ruby ? Maybe these products cannot compete with a highly tuned RDBMS and a proper language with a high performance code generator ?
2.) At least Mr Ellison does not stray into business fields he has no clue of.
3.) I never heard of Mr Ellison forcing people at gunpoint to use his products. Why the hatred ?
4.) Why the hatred for a company which employs 132 000 people, many of them highly educared, skilled and well paid software engineers ?
Full disclosure: I never worked for Mr Ellison nor was I a Oracle specialist. I once developed a smallish Oracle database application. The thing worked, but was totally insecure. telnet oralistener 1521 and some random keypresses crashed the contraption.
I work for an SME and with limited headcount here it seems not quite feasible to replace all stuff written in Java here... and after several attempts at replacing Java with alternative technologies (like golang, rust, etc.) we found that we just keep coming back to Java, as we meet at least one major roadblock for each alternative we evaluated. It is probably due to the fact that our skills are limited, but our man-years in Java-based software development just cannot be replaced with our limited budget and time.
Java is, to us, a language that just works. We just hate the licensing model of Oracle. We were hesitant to use alternative JDKs at first but it has been several years now (for serverside, we are all on Temurin now) and the deployment history has been quite smooth. And we are also evaluating supports from alternative vendors like Azul (their Apple Silicon JDK is awesome) - we fully understand that no software are created freely (as in beer) and all developers need to be paid... we just want to support Java with licensing in a more sensible way. It seems Oracle are in full throttle targeting for the biggest paycheck and we, maybe like other Java-dependent SMEs, will just seek support from other vendors that are more SME friendly.
oracle has wanted to kill off Java for years.
finally they found a way.
If (for example) you're the size of google, the fee to USE Java would be 400 x 150028 which is $60,011,200 PER YEAR just to write small apps.
The license assumes everyone in your company would use that app, so there's a $400 fee per employee (using the item or not)
Walmart with 2.2million employees would need to pay $880,000,000 PER YEAR. They better check none of their point-of-sale systems have java!
I can see this being a huge boost for OpenJDK (and possibly any proprietary Java derivatives still hanging around from IBM's collaboration with Sun Microsystems).
If you are using a lot of Java code, and it is too badly-written to play nicely with OpenJDK, it probably would make more sense either to pay the OpenJDK developers to implement the missing behaviour, or to have the code rewritten -- either in OpenJDK-flavoured Java, or in some other language for which a complete toolchain is available under the GPL -- than it would to stump up for Oracle licences just to keep running it.
And don't forget, if you are paying to have software (re)written, you should also insist on the complete annotated Source Code and permission for all the same things you would expect with a piece of Open Source software -- anyone offering anything less is trying to rip you off.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
