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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

What is Oracle's rationale for the new licensing terms ? It seems counterproductive to me as it will push developers to use OpenJDK ,which is pretty good on its own and "unlink" Oracle from Java in our minds. To be honest, I have climbed through hoops to install Oracle's JDK on my Ubuntu just out of habit. Now I wont do that because any application I develop on this JDK cant be put into production.

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> It seems counterproductive to me as it will push developers to use OpenJDK

OracleJDK is 99% OpenJDK since 8 or 7. OracleJDK comes with some minor performance improvements, used to contain WebStart (removed in 11), Rhino and MissionControl (now GPL2 included in OpenJDK), some build tricks. Not sure what are differences between OracleJDK11 and OpenJDK11, but pretty sure it's really minor and 99.9% of developers won't need them. Oracle actually wants us to use OpenJDK. Remember that OpenJDK has been "forked" a few times already, by Azul, more recently Amazon and RedHat.

Amazon forked OpenJDK?

Yes, they have a customized internal version, just like SAP, Twitter and Alibaba do.

> What is Oracle's rationale for the new licensing terms ?

- they speed up development, by effectively offloading legacy support to others.

- they increase immediate licensing revenues, since many businesses will pay up to stay on "Oracle-supported Java" for production deployments, at least for a while.

- they provide yet another incentive to leave behind all this "old world of installers" and embrace their underwhelming cloud offerings, where you don't have to worry about any license headache (and you can be milked more effectively).

From their point of view, what is there not to like?

> they speed up development, by effectively offloading legacy support

Not really, no. They maintain Java 8 until 2025 and Java 11 until 2026 [1]. If you pay enough they will maintain it literally forever.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.ht...

You might not be familiar with the Oracle policies - which is fair enough, not everyone has worked there ;) Once Premier support is over, the only thing you get for your money is “we will not delete related KM, and we will still answer the phone and tell you you’re screwed”. Even Extended Support is a bit of a joke, you’ll just get “don’t sue me” fixes.

But what I meant is that now they can drop support for any non-LTS Java release immediately, and limit LTS support to shorter periods if they want, because when you call them crying that you need a fix, they can simply point to someone else.

Be that as it may Premier Support for Java 11 still lasts until September 2023. So yes, Premier Support is down to five from eight years but I don't see how this requires a different licensing model.

On a different note my personal experience with Premier Support could best be described as war of attrition. If we won that and got lucky after waiting a few months we got "it's fixed in the next major release". That is the best case. That was with Oracle database, not Java. In general the process is so annoying we won't report a bug unless we absolutely have to. I assume that was the goal behind the design of the process.

Oracle JDK and OpenJDK are now virtually identical (Oracle contributes >90% of the work done on OpenJDK): https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/oracle-jdk-rele...

Big companies which need support and security patches after 6 months can get it from Oracle. Others can update to new OpenJDK after 6 months.

As far as I understand, Red Hat plans to take the lead on supporting a LTS version of OpenJDK 8 after Oracle steps down, with the intent to eventually do the same with 11. Various organizations such as AdoptOpenJDK will then be making releases off that.

In other words: OpenJDK is like Fedora, and OracleJDK is like RHEL?

Yes that is pretty much it.

Idea/PyCharm/etc say they work better with Oracle JDK but I haven't noticed any difference so there seems to be little reason to install Oracle JDK ever. Perhaps it has some features some devs use in some special cases but in general, the Open JDK seems working equally well.

That was in the past, now JetBrains's tools preferred their own, forked OpenJDK

https://github.com/JetBrains/jdk8u

Why? How is it better than the original OpenJDK? There seems to be no answer to this question in the repository readme.

Before Oracle synchronized all the code between the proprietary version and OpenJDK, stuff like the graphics engine and font rendering wasn't the same.

So many applications, including JetBrains ones, did not look that good on FOSS/OS X platforms with many rendering issues.

Hence why JetBrains started bundling their own version of OpenJDK for those not willing to install Oracle JDK.

But why would one need their own version of OpenJDK today?

I ran into this just the other day, Autopsy, a digital forensics application ( https://www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy/ ), requires Oracle JRE and wouldn't even start with OpenJDK when I tried it.

Is the openjdk all lgpl/gpl with link exception? Because if not that leaves five options: distribute to end users without a jre/jdk, bundle under gpl, bundle with other jvm/jre (oracle, other commercial), bundle with graal as native code - but I seem to recall that also has a split license?

Has anyone recently looked into what it takes to distribute a closed, compiled Java app/appliance?

Not that I don't prefer foss - just trying to figure out if that is a diffferentiator?

> Is the openjdk all lgpl/gpl with link exception?

Yes.

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