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Comment by svrma | Hacker News Reader

How does Java pricing work these days (after being bought by Oracle)?

After being rescued by Oracle, after all no one else wanted to buy Sun, not even Google (hoping it would just sink most likely).

Java is as open source and still has multiple implementations available, even Microsoft is now a Java vendor (after having bought jClarity).

Basically you want free beer like Linux? Get a distribution from OpenJDK.

You want support Red-Hat/SuSE style? There is Oracle, and a plenty of other vendors happy to sell JDKs with support.

>After being rescued by Oracle

Java was not rescued by Oracle. There was never any danger of Java going away or not having a proper sponsor. If anything was 'rescued', it was the SPARC/Solaris division of Sun.

At the time, and that is still the case today, Sun / Oracle was the single largest contributor to the Java Ecosystem.

Java will surely live but will it thrive without all those investment?

>At the time, and that is still the case today, Sun / Oracle was the single largest contributor to the Java Ecosystem.

So what? What does that have to do with what I argued?

>Java will surely live but will it thrive without all those investment?

Are you really trying to make the argument that had Oracle not bought Sun, that Java, one of the most popular programming languages, would have gone away?

Definitely, as proven by the high performance JIT and GC implementation available for Ruby and Python by the community.

Heh. OK. Oracle clearly saved Java, the most popular programming language in the world, which also drives much of corporate and government infrastructure. We live in different realities. This idea is so silly I'm not even sure if you're serious, given that SUN's troubles at the time are a matter of historical record. Java was never the problem. In fact, it was SUN's most highly valued asset. SUN never recovered after the dot com crash and industry transition to x86 and Linux, all of which led to the death of SPARC and Solaris. But let's leave it at that.

>as proven by the high performance JIT and GC implementation available for Ruby and Python by the community.

It's almost like interpreted dynamic languages are not quite as conducive to the same kind of optimizations as a statically typed compiled language. JavaScript, another interpreted dynamic language, did have massive amount of resources poured into its JIT and GC implementation. No question there were meaningful performance gains. Is it faster than Java? No. Is it ever going to be faster? No, not unless the language compromises on its dynamic nature.

And you're still chasing this red-herring. I never argued that FOSS can do a better job at evolving a programming language runtime, than a corporate sponsor. Why are you harping on that as if that is an argument to support the idea that java was in trouble and needed a bailout from Oracle?

Sure, where are the post Java 6 FOSS contributions from the community, if I may ask?

I made no statement about who contributed to Java and how much. So what does that have to do with anything?

Are you actually making the argument that had Oracle not bought Sun that Java, one of the most widely used commercial programming language then and now, would have .. what? Gone away? Disappeared?

Definitely, as proven by the high performance JIT and GC implementation available for Ruby and Python by the community.

AFAIK IBM did want to buy Sun but backed out because of potential antitrust reviews.

Indeed, and no one else, specially not Google.

> Basically you want free beer like Linux? Get a distribution from OpenJDK.

After the Oracle lawsuit, why should people feel safe believing that Oracle will respect the terms of the license instead of trying to extract more money and subject you to a costly lawsuit?

The same way they felt safe after Sun won over Microsoft.

... what? That's a non-answer.

Sure it is, Android Java === Google's J++, and the hammer shall fall just as hard.

Google had the opportunity to own Java, decided it wasn't worth the money, so now they should suffer the long due penalty.

That's still not an answer. You're avoiding the question and... I don't know, answering some other question that no one asked, it looks like.

If a company has the option between OpenJDK and its "free" license or paying Oracle for a different license, why would anyone feel safe choosing the former, given that when you deal with Oracle, you deal with the risk of wasting as much money or more to defend yourself in court than the price of Oracle's paid option? Open source licenses are only as good as as the belief by the licensing party that the terms of the license mean anything.

My dear, Oracle SDK == OpenJDK + JFR license + support.

If you don't want to give money to Oracle, there are plenty of other companies to choose from, including Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Alibaba, SAP, Azul.

Once again, you have avoided the question (although you've spiced it up this time with some additional condescension).

You listed OpenJDK as a viable "free" option. Defend it, or don't, but stop trying to pivot the conversation while pretending that changing the subject is a valid answer answer to the thing that was asked.

The ability to understand falls on the recipient.

Your favourite search engine has the answer.

If you feel like trolling, that is your problem, bye.

There is no confusion on this end. You're ignoring the question that I'm asking, because the answer is unpleasant, and you're instead responding with non-answers, because looking like you're saying something when you're really saying nothing is easier.

Facts: We have evidence that Oracle doesn't care about the actual terms of GPL. We have evidence that they're willing to subject people to legal turmoil if Oracle decides they want you to pay instead of using the "free" license.

https://medium.com/@javachampions/java-is-still-free-2-0-0-6...

Another non-answer that avoids the question.

> Defend it, or don't, but stop trying to pivot the conversation while pretending that changing the subject is a valid answer answer to the thing that was asked.

Oracle's lawsuit was for modifying the license.

GPL with Classpath exception covers you well enough.

Google skipped on the GPL license, so they don't get the benefits of that license.... unlike all Java users.

Do you trust Linux? It has the exact same license. Do you have any source where Oracle issued a lawsuit for lawful use of a license?

Amazon Corretto - Free

Java 8,11 supported by a big firm (Amazon)

https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/

Thanks! I haven't heard about this.

Every seems to be being snarky, but on the off chance you care about the actual pricing, and assuming you're talking about Oracle's JDK and not OpenJDK: Oracle's JDK is free to use. You can pay for support if you want, which gives you the bleeding edge security patches immediately (without support you can upgrade every six months to get the all patches). The pricing for support is calculated by CPU core count I believe. So if you're using Java in production on 100 cores, that's going to be more expensive than 10. I don't have the specific numbers off the top of my head though.

I was not trying be to snarky. I was genuinely curious to know how it is priced after the oracle acquisition. As a language that I am most used to, I wanted to evaluate how much it'd cost (a rough estimate based on cores/users) if I were to launch a web service based on Java.

Since Java is free to use and is primarily developed as a GPL software - there are no licensing costs, that you would care about.

Not if you want to use Oracle's JVM to run something on anything but a laptop or desktop. They will absolutely want you to pay for that and will make sure you do.

But Oracle’s JVM is the exact same as the OpenJDK in terms of functionality - just to clarify it.

Oracle actually publish their price list for Oracle Java here - https://www.oracle.com/uk/corporate/pricing/#java-se

In short, starts at $25 per processor per month, discounts starting at 100+ . Look at using OpenJDK/ Amazon Corretto instead

OpenJDK is Oracle's free, open-source implementation of the Oracle JDK. It is where Oracle does all of its JDK development. You can use it with no restrictions. If you want to pay for support, you can pay Oracle or any of several other companies that package up and support the OpenJDK. If you choose to pay Oracle, you'll get the Oracle JDK which is identical to the OpenJDK except for a couple of error messages and the ID string.

It's worth pointing out that with Oracle's new Java licensing model whether something is free on charge depends on a number of things including how Oracle thinks it's being deployed.

The Oracle JDK is indeed free of charge for developing aplications, but running that app using Oracle Java on a server as opposed to a desktop needs a paid license subscription & generates exposure to Oracle license audits.

Many, many firms are now using OpenJDK and the like, and have policies against even downloading Oracle's version.

You can use OpenJDK (via adoptopenjdk, Redhat or many others) and it's free.

Or you pay Oracle for support. Or some other company.

Oracle isn't special.

Well, on the other hand OpenJDK is 99% Oracle's work repackaged.

If Oracle decided to stop putting out new FOSS-licenced versions, there would be no new OpenJDK releases (since all the core Java devs are Oracle employees).

So it's like a no-community project, where you get a dump of FOSS code every now and then from a vendor.

In recent Java versions, there's roughly 20% of external contributions:

https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/the-arrival-of-...

Oracle seems to pursue GraalVM EE as a way to monetize Java. It would be insane for them to change the license, piss off companies with deep pockets, risk a hard fork and see most employees working on the JDK leave.

>In recent Java versions, there's roughly 20% of external contributions:

Have to check your link to find out, but is it by number or by impact?

(Asking cause many projects have seemingly many "external contributors" but if one looks almost all real work happens by a core team, and the external contributors just do some change here and there, or even clerical work, like fixing comments and documentation and such).

The post measures by issue count, though not all issues are equal.

> Of the 2,136 JIRA issues marked as fixed in Java 15, 1,702 were completed by people working for Oracle, while 434 were contributed by individual developers and developers working for other organizations.

A correction - all the core Java developers are paid by Oracle to develop Java. I doubt that Oracle would win anything, by abandoning OpenJDK.

And now - they can't. Companies that are able to maintain Java are X times larger than Oracle and the core team would easily be rehired by IBM, Google, Aamazon, Facebook, Apple, etc...

None of the companies you listed would gain much over current model. They would rather move to different technologies in case Java is abandoned.

> Companies that are able to maintain Java are X times larger than Oracle

With exception of maybe IBM which anyway is crapping out, none of the other owe their business success to directly to Java based product or services. If Java were to be abandoned they can easily migrate / rewrite their internal tools / products to a different platform even if it takes 5-10 years. It is not like current prod systems will stop working just by announcement.

Also to think further Oracle abandons Java , Amazon and Google would have huge incentive to either charge lot more for Java on cloud or redirect their customers to alternatives.

> They would rather move to different technologies in case Java is abandoned.

They had the opportunity to do so for at least a decade now, but they didn't. Google, even after the massive row with Oracle, still uses Java extensively. Still has new projects written in Java(or running on JVM). Having a big legal battle between Google and Oracle would surely have dissuaded FAANGs from starting Java projects, right? Nope... You're flat out wrong.

> Java were to be abandoned they can easily migrate / rewrite

That's one delusional world you live in.

> It is not like current prod systems will stop working just by announcement.

And what makes you think that those big boys aren't going to be interested in maintaining JVM?

As opposed to which big open-source project? Do you really believe linux is a few individuals’ work? Just look at which companies pay the contributors.

Free forever. It's open source.

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