Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

FYI, Oracle is pushing this agenda to squeeze Java shops in other places as well.

The tack they are taking is to define any computer that does "one specific thing" as an embedded device and ask you for $300+ per "device", plus some other lofty fees. (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/price-lists/java-...)

So, if you're using Java in a kiosk, ATM, media player, etc, they may be coming for you.

My guess is that this just spawns a mass migration to OpenJDK, but perhaps they trap enough Java shops that it's worth the effort?

View on HN

My guess is this just spawns a mass migration away from Java altogether.

Not knowing when Oracle might decide to shake down your business is a massive incentive to use anything else.

Didn't I recently hear something about Google rebuilding Android to remove Java? Or am I totally off?

I think they said they were moving to OpenJDK for Android.

That would likely cost much more than this extortion, and still wouldn't save them.

First, I don't see any way that moving to OpenJDK is going to cost more than $10 billion. Second, if I understand correctly, OpenJDK has a license grant from Oracle. That's going to make it really hard for Oracle to say that Google doesn't have permission to use it.

Moving to OpenJDK might not, but does not retroactively ameliorate any issues they had.

I also suspect that OpenJDK's license might bite them in problematic ways, or they would have either done that to start or not had such difficulty negotiating an agreement under whatever terms Java possessed that Google might have wanted alternatives for.

> Moving to OpenJDK ... does not retroactively ameliorate any issues they had.

True. It does prevent damages going forward, however, and it removes Oracle's biggest club - a court order forbidding any further shipments of Android.

More than 9 billion? Give 36,000 people $250,000 a year salary and you still haven't hit 9.2 billion. Pretty sure they could get it done in a year with 36,000 people.

37 women cannot have one baby in one week.

The only thing better than throwing more engineers at an already-late solution is hiring a mass swarm of engineers and turning them loose on a only-semi-bounded new problem.

Why wouldn't it?

How is this any difference than installing Windows 10 on your Kiosk? You are paying for updates and support. You are free to use Linux and OpenJDK if you don't want to pay. Most shops I know of are using OpenJDK for all production deployments at this point unless you have a larger contract with Oracle.

It would be similar if Windows originally released with a license that let you use it without charge, and then later changed the terms of the license in an obscure way that classified a full sized PC as an embedded device.

Since Windows has been clear from the start that any commercial use requires a paid license, it's not similar in any way at all.

Kiosk licensing has always been required for shipping machines pre-installed with java. Sun required this 10+ years ago as well.

I'm not a lawyer but I believe this what you can do that you can't do with windows is ship the kiosk without java but give the customer a CD-ROM to install it themselves.

Reminds me of the good burghers of SCO and that little shitty they tried to pull off in the beginning of the century.

It didn't end well.

Sure it did. Linux.

Both the Linux kernel and the GNU OS predate Caldera acquiring the Santa Cruz Operation and turning into a lawsuit house.

But SCO preceeded Linux. If there'd been a cheap version of SCO in the first half of the 1990s, I doubt I'd have looked twice at Linux. My employer at the time did look at SCO, but WFWG solved the problem for us.

But your sequencing is dead on. It's a messy story.

Ah. I think the original commenter was referring to the lawsuits, not to SCO's business model when it actually had products and services.

How would this affect me if i'm using Tomcat to run something like Solr? Am I suddenly on the hook to pay Oracle, even if I am using OpenJDK?

OJDK is GPL v2, so you're a-okay there unless you're shipping a binary (in which case, upon customer request, the source + derivative code has to be released). RH puts out a "100% free" version under the moniker 'Iced Tea', if you want to play it safe. Realistically, attorneys are expensive -- going after a startup worth maybe 10MM on paper for a license violation isn't an economically prudent move for anyone.

OJDK is GPL, but with the "Classpath Exception", which makes a big difference.

http://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html

will this affect jvm languages as well?

I don't think there is a lot of embedded Java left.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com