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Comment by occamrazor | Hacker News Reader

Still a shitty license:

> [For LTS Oracle JDK versions] security updates will be available for a total of three years. After that period, further use of the Oracle JDK in production requires a commercial license.

Apparently the business model is having commercial customers deploy Oracle JDK and suing them as soon as they forget to upgrade after three years.

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I interpret this that if you want more then 3 years of security issues fixes you have to pay, it is similar on how other companies charge for extended support, if you don't like it you update faster.

But what is your opinion, everything should be free for big companies to use and then who pays the developers? Even in Linux world you need to pay to get extended LTS support.

Maybe the author meant continued updates. But they said continued use.

The person you replied to didn't say anything against paying for support.

I read it as after three years the Oracle JDK cannot be used any longer without a license, there is no option to continue using it in production without support.

Reminds me of the free for non commercial use VirtualBox plugin that makes itself super easy to install by random endusers, and then phones home so that enforcement on the sales side is almost automated.

You also can not distribute it for no fee, which impacts anyone that wants to, say, do a desktop app and ship a bundled executable, which is, arguably, a key tenet of the modularization effort done in JDK 9 to make the JRE lighter and more nimble.

That seems like a mistake, but it's very problematic if true. Having to go through a grueling JVM version update every 3 years, or more often if you can't jump 3 years worth of JVM updates at once? Brutal.

> grueling JVM version update

Since when is it grueling? 8->9 was slightly hard, but mostly due to old dependencies doing shit with sun.misc.*, they shouldn’t have and it took time to update them. But even a Java 1.1 class file will run just fine on Java 17, and with the strong encapsulation enabled in recent versions, no hard update will come again (as the internals are not reachable from code, they are free to change)

I mean, I hate Oracle as much as the next person, but I don't really see a problem with "stay current or pay for LTS".

Problem is “pay if you forgot about that tiny service in dusty corner which just worked for 3 years”. You are not allowed to forget to update.

Right, the question is whether it's "after X time using it at all costs money", or "after X time updates cost money" - one of those is a lot easier to defend.

s/Oracle OpenJDK/Oracle JDK/

They can't sue you for using OpenJDK.

thanks, I fixed the terminology in my post

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